On practical solutions

Just some lighthearted overnight reading:

Limiting the Toll of Gas Prices

The price of economy gasoline in and around Huntsville, Ala., is at about $3 a gallon, a little above the national average. As it climbed to that level in recent weeks, faculty and staff members at Calhoun Community College heard increasing griping from students about the toll that commuting to class was putting on their already tight budgets.
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Calhoun administrators brainstormed to "see if there were any alternatives we could come up with that would make it easier on their pocketbooks."
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They decided to alter the Decatur campus's class schedule for the spring term so that all courses that now meet for 50 minutes each Monday, Wednesday and Friday will instead be held just Mondays and Wednesdays, for an hour and 15 minutes each.

Commuting to campus in New York is a different beast altogether, so these kinds of complaints aren't really relevant at schools around here. But it's interesting to see the earliest signs of how large organizations respond to an energy crunch.

Update [2005-10-13 9:28:49 by ianqui]: In the previous thread, DuncanK pointed us to this pretty interesting Business Week article called "Living Too Large in Exurbia". I believe these articles now seem to be increasingly more common...