Oregon’s self-serve-gas bill is a small victory for freedom in a state otherwise at war with the concepts of human self-sufficiency and self-determination.
Oregon’s self-serve-gas bill is a small victory for freedom in a state otherwise at war with the concepts of human self-sufficiency and self-determination.
T hat the Oregon legislature rarely does good things is obvious to even disinterested witnesses of the state’s many recent self-inflicted wounds. For most of us who call Oregon home, it is, as the kids say, a lived truth. For Oregonians who live what most Americans would call normal lives — work for a living, drive a car, own a home, want their kids to go to a school that is both open and not primarily indoctrination-focused — our state government usually acts as if it hates us.
But like the broken clock that is right once per decade — it’s a weird clock, okay — the state’s elected leaders have chanced their way into doing something that will benefit many, in fact most, Oregonians.
They might just let us pump our own gas.
The legislature, at the end of its just-completed session, narrowly passed a bill that would reverse the state’s 70-year ban on self-service gasoline. The bill now awaits Governor Tina Kotek’s signature, and, in another surprise, she’s considered likely to sign it.
In the 1950s, when Oregon’s ban on self-service gas was enacted, most states were passing similar laws. Pumping gas was seen as too dangerous for the motoring public. Gas stations often doubled as mechanic shops, so there was usually a mechanically inclined staff person or two available to fill the tanks, check the oil, and generally protect Americans from fiery death.
Over the decades, the mechanic shops were gradually replaced with convenience stores and the mechanically inclined staffers with people anchored to the cash register inside. Simultaneously, improved safety technology made gas pumping less dangerous, and the inclusion of credit-card readers in the pumps made self-service even faster and easier.
States gradually responded to changing safety and market and consumer imperatives and lifted self-service bans. Today, only two states, Oregon and New Jersey, stand in the breach. Oregon’s ban has shown cracks in recent years. State officials have allowed self-service at stations in rural parts of the state, but not in more urban areas. Oregon’s response to Covid was, for the most part, to treat Oregonians as though each was possessed of dangerously subhuman intelligence, but officials lifted the self-service ban for a time to reduce person-to-person contact. Soon, heat waves and wildfire smoke brought temporary reprieve from the ban for the putative purpose of reducing employees’ exposure to extreme heat and smoke.
Meanwhile, the post-pandemic tight labor market meant that when the self-service ban was in place, many stations closed half or more of their pumps, or closed altogether, for lack of employees willing to wield the nozzle. Oregonians often found themselves waiting in line to fill up like OPEC had gotten its groove back.
The confluence of these factors convinced the legislature to pass a bill lifting the self-service ban across the state — albeit by only one vote in the state senate.
Self-serve gas itself, and the bill specifically, remain controversial. If you want normally placid Oregonians to start fighting with each other, bring up the question of self-serve gas. Many consider never pumping their own gas a birthright, so the bill requires stations to provide at least as many attended as self-serve pumps. The governor, as she contemplates signing the bill, has expressed some ambiguity about it and asked Oregonians to let her know what they think. R.I.P. her inbox.
The critics are wrong with regard to the particulars and the broader import of the bill. Self-serve gas will save Oregonians time by giving them the option of filling up their own tanks rather than waiting for understaffed stations to do it for them. It will free up labor at the bottom end of the income scale for more productive, i.e. not state-spawned, pursuits. It will relieve small-business owners of unnecessary and costly regulation, for it is they — not the big oil companies you see on the signs — who own the stations.
More broadly, the bill is one small stroke against the West Coast current of bludgeoning individuals into behaviors deemed by their governments better than those that individuals might otherwise choose if left to their own devices. It expands, rather than contracts or attempts to manipulate, individual choice.
Living in Oregon or one of its neighboring and like-minded West Coast, car-hating, homeless-cultivating, hard-drug-indulging nanny states is to experience, daily, the fact that your state government just barely tolerates your presence on account of your marginal contribution to the ever-growing tax-revenue haul. If you choose to work, you will part with a relentlessly expanding percentage of the fruits of your labor. If you choose to traverse parts of Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, or Los Angeles and complain about the manifest disorder and human wreckage therein, you will be called a fascist. If you dare to drive a car, well, then you’re really going to pay in the form of the highest gas prices in the nation.
Oregon, even more than its neighbors, fetishizes control over where people live, how they commute, and the energy source with which they cook their food. It is a state that has decriminalized hard drugs but banned plastic straws. It is a place where the freedom to camp on public sidewalks is enshrined in law, but building a house can take years on account of the red tape.
The self-serve-gas bill is a small victory for freedom in a state otherwise at war with the concepts of human self-sufficiency and self-determination.
Give me the gas nozzle or give me death!