Do people really care abour our crisis?!?

[mtbiker278]

So I was driving to work this morning and saw up on the traffic notification sign the message, "Slower speeds save gas". I know this to be true as well as anyone else on this site. I started to wonder if the general public would know this as well. My guess is probably not. However, here was this sign telling them so. It's not just a billboard, or advertisement. It's a MDOT controlled message board for traffic alerts. It's not like they're going to lie or anything.

So as I'm driving under the sign doing about 52mph, the speed limit is 55 mind you, a whole slew of people are passing me. The most noticeable one is the guy in his H2 doing about 75-80 in the left lane. This got me thinking about people in general. I would hope that people would feel the need to conserve since we are diving into this oil crisis, but the opposite seems to be true. Now I could understand maybe a couple people who just don't care, or are running late, or some other excuse necessitating them to drive 70mph when the speed limit is 55. Unfortunately it wasn't just a couple people, it was everyone on the road other than me. I thought maybe I just didn't see anyone driving the same speed cause the exits were so far away, but this didn't really make sense to me.

I just don't understand why people don't make the slight effort to conserve just a little. I'm not saying that everyone should go out and buy a hybrid, although that would be awesome. What makes people totally disregard the fact that we should be conserving? I wonder if this whole fuel conservation is going to be like getting people to recycle? Is it going to take a city mandate to force everyone to conserve our resources?