I'm starting to wonder how long I will be able to drive my truck!

As the owner of a Chevy truck, I use a considerable amount of gas. When gas prices started to rise in 2003, I began complaining about the $50 I spent to fill my 30 gallon tank. Today, I stopped breathing when I paid $75 for a tank of gas. Given that I don't have many options, I feel that my lifestyle is being hijacked.

My options are either: ride my bike or drive my truck. It is a black or white situation. The bus is not an option. It is quicker to take the bike than the bus. The bus system in southern California is terrible. I'm not sure if it is better in other states, but I know the bus system is much worse than the trains I rode in England, Holland, and Paris.

We are really starting to pay the price for the monopoly that took over American transportation so many years ago. Our lifestyles are going to have to change and we don't have the type of public transportation system to accommodate a smooth transition.

We are in the middle of the big gas screw. If rising housing costs wasn't an adequate torture, we are now supposed to spend another third of our incomes on gas. Perhaps this is just another conspiracy by car companies desperate to hold onto their market position. As gas prices increases, the car companies can sell us our only alternative. The car companies will solve our problems by selling us something else - another car. How ironic; the solution to our problem is in another product brought to us by an auto industry company - the hybrid.

Can we get some good public transportation instead? Is there any way we can stop spending money on the so called war and start spending money where we need it - public transportation.

If this is truly a free market, then there is nothing to loose from diversity in a public transportation system. We could have more trains with more destinations and then there could be a whole industry that develops around a train culture. We could have kiosks popping up at local train stations around the country. We could have a new magazine "American Trainsportation." Just think of all the possibilities. There would even be a bonus, those who have been prospering on oil and the environmental tragedies that go along with the oil business would fall from grace and we could get a new mix of power brokers in the U.S.