Oh, I can completely understand their frustrations about rising fuel cost. What I meant was I don't understand the reasoning behind deciding to go on strike as a form of protest, it seems rather like a temper tantrum that's really not going to have much of an effect in achieving anything.

I just don't see a connection between going on strike and the end goal. Are they trying to get the oil companies to lower their prices? The government to lower the taxes on fuel? Or the public to demand some sort change? I really don't know what the goal is supposed to be. The only people who are really going to be affected is the public, the same group who has absolutely no power to do anything about it. If they really wanted to be effective, they would need to get complete support from ALL truckers, then there would be some bargaining power.

There is one other group of people besides the public that is going to be effected by this, the truckers are. Their income is going to stop when on strike with no change in fuel prices.

They are going to loose in the short term by not working. But it may also have long term effects on the independents. People that use (hire) independent truckers will probably go with company or fleet trucking companies. After all they need to get products to market. I would also guess some of these people will stay with the company / fleet trucking companies. The independents will loose future income from this strike as they will become unreliable to deliver goods.

"...I don't understand the reasoning behind deciding to go on strike..."

Me either really...

They're also talking about a traffic slowdown to clog the highways.

I don't know how effective it would be (probably not much), but they're at least trying to make a point. The rest of America has been trained from childhood to just grin and bear it, with inflated gas prices as well as everything else.

In Britain, a gallon of gasoline is perilously close to $10.

I wonder how high it would have to get here in the U.S. before people really started to fuss?

Sue

"...to clog the highways..."

Many years ago the independant truckers threatened to just park their rigs on major highways, in the traffic lanes of course, and walk away. Thank goodness that didn't happen, at least where I was working. There are not enough big rig tow trucks available to clean up a mess like that anytime soon...

Another thing to realize too, is the average person might have went through $45 in gas a week and now is spending $55 a week, for many it isn't a big deal.

An owner/operator trucker on the other hand used to be paying say $650 a fill and is now paying over $800 a fill. That's an extra ~$150 out of pocket they have to pay everytime they fill up, which can often be more than once a week. Yet many aren't making much more to make up for that extra money they are laying it. I know most of us wouldn't be too happy if we took a paycut of a few hundred dollars a week.

I'm actually really suprised they haven't started rioting already.

Not to drift off the subject, but my last ticket was on I-5 about 22 years ago. Stopped near Colinga, CA - that's where I eventually had to appear anyway. The Highway Patrol officer was not happy that it took him 12 miles to catch up to me.

Ahh, to be young and dumb again!

OBG - could our paths have crossed before?

It's called an import tariff.

Hmm, if gas prices here reached $10 a gallon, and let's say the president said there was a way to get it back to under $3 a gallon if we were just willing to start drilling up north again, I wonder what congress would say then? Do you suppose we'd be sending drill rigs up north soon after that? You bet we would.

Sound familiar? Anyone remember when Bush tried to get legislation through allowing us to do just that at the beginning of his presidency, and congress said "NO" because the environmentalists said it would wreak havoc on the habitat?

Change is inevitable, you can resist it, but it'll cost ya. We are going to pay the price for our "principles" because we listened to a bunch of chicken littles and did the PC thing. Ain't it funny how much the PC thing always seems to cost us so much more in the long run and accomplishes nothing, yet we keep making the same old mistakes over and over.

We need oil. There's a whole lot of oil up north. We will go get oil wherever oil is. Right now we are willing to pay a high price to keep our principles intact. There will come a point where the cost of oil outweighs the value of our principles. Maybe it will be when gas is $5 a gallon, maybe not until it is $10 a gallon. It is inevitable, Mr. Anderson...

To keep gas at $2.50 a gallon the US government would have to buy gas at that rate - a US government subsidy of the difference between market rate and $2.50. Currently that's $1.50 per gallon (diesel). Alternatively, the US government would have to produce their own supply, such as in the ANWR, and make it available for less than market rate (what China or India would pay for the production). Billions of dollars of government subsidies and/or nationalization of oil production - does anyone think that either proposal has some deliciously sweet irony behind it? Be careful what you wish for, because someday you may surely get it.

Because you know that Exxon or Imperial Oil isn't going to sell ANWR production solely to the US and solely for a discount - not without an additional subsidy to make up the difference between $2.50 and what they could be paid for it (or for what it costs to extract - ANWR is no cakewalk). This of course would be on top of their billions of dollars annual of US government subsidies, recently renewed. I don't think increasing US production via ANWR would have more than an incremental impact on gasoline prices, because it would have only an incremental impact on the global oil supply. Because its the global oil market that ANWR would produce for, and the global market that the US market *always* purchases from. True since the advent of OPEC. And who always will have the money to bid up and buy the ANWR production on an open market? China - thanks to a couple decades of trade imbalances in their favor, Americans buying up their consumer goods production. Chinese goods, moved off the ships and around America by those O/O truckers who are now protesting the high cost of diesel gasoline. I sympathize, my brothers.

We have met the enemy, and he is us...