Somewhere between the highway-heavy Labor Day weekend, and October's turn-on-the-furnace season, Americans engage in a kind of annual ritual: examining our national energy policies. This year, the conversation is more urgent because hurricanes Katrina and Rita have disrupted energy production in the Gulf of Mexico, raising the costs of driving and heating to record levels.

The good news is, in response to the current crunch, Americans are finding ways to use less gas. There are news stories about increased car pooling, telecommuting and bus riding from Tallahassee to Pittsburgh to Salt Lake City. Employers and employees are collaborating on ways to encourage conservation and keep business and household budgets under control.

Consumers are showing a preference for cars that make better use of gasoline; some car dealers report drivers trading in their gas-guzzlers for hybrids as Govs. Jeb Bush of Florida and Bill Richardson of New Mexico did recently. Governments are also stepping up to the plate, finding ways for their large work forces to conserve during this crisis.

But the bad news is this is not just a short-term crisis. It's been a long time coming, largely because we've had our heads in the sand when it comes to planning our communities and commutes. For example, between 1982 and 1997, the amount of urbanized land in the United States grew from 51 million acres to about 76 million acres. That's an increase of almost 50 percent of the countryside getting covered with roads and buildings. And right alongside this sprawling growth, the number of vehicle miles driven by Americans increased more than 50 percent, despite population growth of only 17 percent.

Budgets for planning and development at the state, local and national level go overwhelmingly to building roads rather than other means for people to get around. For decades, more than 80 percent of federal transportation dollars have gone to highways, leaving less than 20 percent for other transportation choices such as subways and streetcars. In a related trend, from 1960 to 1990, the percentage of workers with jobs outside the county where they lived grew three-fold, while the percentage of people who worked within their home county declined.

Last month, the Environmental Working Group analyzed what all this meant for people in the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the country. We found that in places where commuters had more options for getting to work, drivers spent fewer dollars filling up their cars. The more access they had to buses and shuttles and trains, the less they spent on gasoline. In these times of skyrocketing gas prices, this means the more people are forced to drive long distances, the more high gas prices hurt them.

People who live in and around Nashville, Tenn., for example, drive more than anyone, putting an average of 16,473 miles on their cars every year. As a community, Nashville will spend almost $750 million on gasoline this year if the price stays around $3 per gallon. That means over the next 12 months, each household there will spend nearly $4,500 of its hard-earned dollars to fill up the car, and it will cost an average driver about $2,400 to get around. By contrast, a driver in Chicago spends much less — $1,604 per year at $3 a gallon largely because Chicagoans have better transportation choices than the citizens of Nashville or Atlanta, Denver, Detroit or 30 other areas where driving great distances is about the only way of getting around.

President Bush recently made headlines by mentioning energy conservation as one part of our response to current energy challenges. His overall energy policy, however, involves the suspension of all kinds of health and environmental protections in order to increase drilling, increase pollution and actually increase the oil dependence that got us here. A crisis is a time to revisit the policies that got you there not recommit to more of the same.

The American public is taking the lead on conservation in these times of sky-high gas prices. It is time for our leaders to follow.