How bad will Houston get hit?

[Big_Hitter]

That is a nothing commute to the Galleria area. I lived in that zip code for about 5 years and it took 25 minutes to get to work in the Galleria area. That was due to the Westpark Tollway. It was a very easy commute.

guess it depends on how close you live to the tollway

I know people that lived in greatwood/Richmond that had commutes well over an hour.

One of my HS friends lives off of 99/I-10 takes way over an hour to get downtown.

The galleria is just awful, no park and ride busses and lots of cars. If I had an afternoon meeting there it would take 40 minutes just to get to 610/shepherd.

Widening the freeways just made things worse, IMO. People kept moving out there....maybe with the oil bust traffic is better

 

[ERD50]

Bumping this thread because crude is $27.50 today. Will my job and/or Houston survive?

Yesterday, I heard a news item talking about how the oil industry will lose a lot of jobs. I didn't quite get this. With oil prices low, people are driving more, and buying lower mpg cars on average (short memories, a lot more excitement over Prius, Leaf and Chevy Volt with $4 gas). So shouldn't there be more work in the oil industry?

My guess is that the low prices mean we are importing cheap oil, and much of our domestic oil is too expensive to produce? So production of domestic oil is being cut? Is that it?

Do we domestically refine most of the gasoline we use, or do we actually import gasoline (versus importing crude and refining it)? If we refine here, that should at least mean there is demand for those jobs. I seem to recall that our refineries are designed for the higher grades of oil, so maybe that plays into all this as well? I obviously don't know much about the oil industry, sorry if these are "Oil for Dummies" type questions!


PS: And by 'domestic', I do mean USA - I do realize we have many posters from outside the USA.

-ERD50

 

[Big_Hitter]

Yesterday, I heard a news item talking about how the oil industry will lose a lot of jobs. I didn't quite get this. With oil prices low, people are driving more, and buying lower mpg cars on average (short memories, a lot more excitement over Prius, Leaf and Chevy Volt with $4 gas). So shouldn't there be more work in the oil industry?

-ERD50

I heard an economist say that people are saving, not spending the windfall from low fuel costs. I know I am.