Swift action is often motivated by steep, and sudden, price rises. Two-dollar-a-litre petrol in Canberra is a significant psychological threshold which will no doubt prompt some reflection among motorists about the way they drive.
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With cost of living pressures mounting on a range of essential items - and a significant period of low, or no, wage growth - a rapid hike in the petrol price is felt deeply.
People need to get around. They need to get to work and school. Many people will find the number of kilometres they need to drive is fixed, not determined by the price of the fuel they use to do it.
The question is whether they need to do it in a petrol car. Could public transport or an electric vehicle play a greater role?
Canberrans are already leading the nation in the number of electric vehicles bought per capita. Motorists in the capital bought 825 new electric cars last year, figures from the Electric Vehicle Council show. They made up more than 5 per cent of all vehicle sales in the territory.
With readily available cheap electricity, offset to be entirely renewable in the ACT, the argument for an electric vehicle looks even better.
The exogenous global shocks - like the Russian invasion of Ukraine - that force up global oil prices and flow right through to the pump price will keep happening. Oil resources are finite. In the long term, its cost can only go up.
Not to mention it is a resource best left unused. Transport emissions are the biggest source of greenhouse gases in the ACT. Cutting those emissions is a critical task for the city.
Growing interest in electric cars, prompted by the rising costs of running an old-style internal combustion engine, is something to be welcomed.
But it is to be lamented that the federal government has dithered on the issue of electric vehicles, when it has been in a position to promote and support their uptake.
When the history of electric vehicle take up comes to be written, the missed opportunities in Australia will be front and centre.
The budget on Tuesday offers the federal government an opportunity to make up for lost time. Instead of cancelling the weekend, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison suggested electric cars would, the technology could save the weekend, freeing people from the prohibitive cost of petrol.
The future of the internal combustion engine is limited. Globally, hard deadlines are fast approaching by which time no new fossil-fuel-powered cars will be sold.
Australia's federal government needs to get into gear to ensure the country isn't left by the side of the road on the future of transport.
