Mike Rutherford's column

After driving 2,000 miles from the top to the bottom of America last week, I am in a state of shock. Holidaying in Orlando, Los Angeles and the other unreal bits of the USA is one thing. But a drive along the Michigan/Ohio Rust Belt to the Deep South and beyond opens up a different America – one I’m entirely not comfortable with.

Minutes into my trek from Detroit to Miami, I saw signs threatening me with massive fines and prison time if I dared run over a worker at the side of the road. Never mind that they were putting their lives and my liberty in danger by apparently doing a meaningless job –  trimming the not unattractive lush long grass that flanked an unattractive interstate road. Should drivers really be bankrupted by fines and do time in jail because road workers seem so keen to casually use hard shoulders as pedestrian walkways?

Next sign I saw said simply: “Support our troops – donate your car!” Not sure if it was an order or a request and I’m still uncertain what the US Army would do with an ageing Oldsmobile handed over by a patriotic citizen. Any idea?

Neither am I sure why fuel prices are still THE only discussion point across America. True, their gallons are smaller than ours, but it’s still possible today to buy one for less than /£2. In my experience it’s hard to find an American who believes we pay nearly three times more than them at the pumps. And those who do insist that if their gas stations ever tried to charge ordinary folk (£6) a gallon, there would be an “armed response” – whatever that means.

Rumour has it that carjackers have been replaced by gasjackers – desperate thieves armed with weapons (and fuel cans!), who attack drivers not for their vehicles, but for the valuable liquid they have in their tanks.

With all this in mind, I’m staggered to learn from the National Vehicle Fuel and Emissions Lab that light duty pick-up trucks (the sort of vehicles the average American drives) typically did 17.5mpg in 1985, 17.4 in 1990, 17 in 1995, 16.9 in 2000, 17.2 in 2005 and 17.7 last year. This makes no sense. Today’s hatches and saloons are much more fuel efficient than those of two decades ago, but American pick-up trucks have stood still in terms of how far they’ll go (or won’t go) on a gallon. And in a country with 200 million licence holders each driving an average 14,908 miles annually, untold billions of dollars and barrels of oil are being wasted.

Not that the American motorist deserves all the blame for making the country the world’s largest consumer of oil. Car drivers chugging along at or around 70 in the States are often overtaken by lorries doing 10-15mph more. Their drivers and the firms that employ them must be aware of the all too obvious dangers and colossal fuel wastage. But they merely bleat about the price of fuel – and wonder why truckers are more likely to die at work than any other Americans, military personnel included. (Latest statistics say “transportation incidents” claim the lives of around 2,400 workers a year).  

Americans need to slow down, think deeper and change some of their ways. I offer this humble advice to the industries and people of the USA and to the police I ask a simple question: when a motorist crashed his car in Florida last week after suffering a medical seizure, did officers really have to deal with
his obvious distress and pain by pointing guns at him…. and shooting the poor man?