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When the price of a barrel of oil first reached $110, in early 2008, National Public Radio ran a news story in which a reporter spoke with a young woman who owned a Chevrolet Tahoe, which she said she used mainly to drive (alone) between home, work, and school. "I kind of regret getting me an SUV," she said, and added that she hoped the price of gas wouldn't rise above $3.50 because, if it did, "I'm just going to have to go on the bus, I think." She laughed when she said that, as though it were an amusing absurdity, but she had pinpointed the dilemma. Moving her from a car to a bus would be a good outcome for the environment, not only because it would shrink her personal fuel consumption and reduce, by one car, the outward pressure that causes inefficient suburbs to metastasize, but also because it would help to supply the critical mass of users on which successful, cost-effective transit systems depend. By contrast, moving her from her current gas guzzler to a more sensible car would be a relative environmental loss, because her reduced fuel cost would merely relieve the economic discomfort that had caused her to think about public transit in the first place.