gas prices in your area

where are we at?

I just paid 2.41 per gallon for premium at a Shell station in the San Francisco Bay area.. 2.20 for regular..

do i win?

$1.92-$2.01 for Regular in the general area I live in south Florida.

In the DC area, I can go to a few discount gas stations and find regular as low as $1.86. On the other hand, stations near my job have regular as high as $1.98, and premium around 2.08.

I paid $2.229 per gallon for the middle grade gas at Chevron yesterday. I live in southwestern Washington State, just across the Columbia River from Portland, OR. This is the highest I've seen gas prices here in quite a while.

..and i thought $1.73 for regular was high!!

..and that's full-serve!

..well, "full-serve" as in they pump the gas. not as in 'back in the day' when it meant: air pressure checked and filled, oil checked, windows cleaned, etc..


i still say it's time for more hybrid cars and to look forward to an alternative to "gas".. i know it's being done, the heck with the big oil companies! natural resources run out.. let them supply oil heat for homes if they want, at least it doesn't pollute the way cars do!

personally, i'm looking forward to hydrogen-fueled cars. what did they expel? water! WATER!
..not poisonous gas, WATER!!!

We need fuel cells. Like, now.

I have to admit, the saddest thing I've seen in recent memory was a collage of all the pictures of the people who died in Iraq (from that Nightline episode) with the following words on it.

700+ have died so you can drive your SUV.

"Mission Accomplished"
-George W. Bush

Ugh Darwin...that makes my stomach flip over.

I'm in San Diego, home to the highest gas prices in the country and crappy public transport! Woohoo!

I think the last time I got gas, it was well over $2.40. Fun stuff. I predict we'll hit $3.00 by the end of June.

$2 for the cheap gas, even out on Bainbridge Island.

Durn good thing I got a Honda Civic hybrid -- wandered away from my last fill-up shaking my head over $24 for a 4/5 tank fill-up.

$1.86 around here, in near-podunk Nebraska.

'Course, I only know because I rented a car and had to fill the tank before returning it. Otherwise, I usually bike or bus (cheaper gas that way).

We can yammer on about fuel cells all we want, but the only reason the price of gas is even that big of a deal in the first place is because we've let ourself spread out as much as we have. If we all made a habit of living near where we worked and got out of the habit of driving across town to go shop at Wal*Mart just because we can save 25 cents on laundry detergent, well, it just wouldn't be that big of a deal.

Personally, I think we'd be better off in general, too, if we changed our lifestyles, not our cars, in that it would favor small businesses and community life. But that's just my wacky, bike-ridin' philosophy. Too many hours eating dirt and dodging crazy drivers too caught up in their cell-phone conversations to pay much attention to pedestrians, bikers, or other cars.

Well, yeah, but let's face it... that's not going to happen. The people that drive across town for a Wal*Mart are the people that want to save money. And if we could do it in a fuel cell, it would be cheaper for them and better for the environment at the same time.

You can't change human nature, but you can change the way it manifests itself in it's surroundings quite easily.

Kinnie,

You don't know what crappy public transport is until you've lived outside of Atlanta.

*edit because I forgot a word. heh.

*laughs* Well, perhaps not, Darwin. But let's consider:

(1) Large corporations will voluntarily invest in (or tax-payers will support public funding for) research to develop fuel-cell technology to the point where selling fuel-cell cars will not prove an undue disadvantage in the marketplace (i.e. Will not be significantly more expensive than gas-guzzling cars, will be able to go just as far without refueling and just as fast, and will not cost significantly more than gas-guzzling cars to refuel or maintain).

(2) People will voluntarily choose to patronize stores nearer to where they live, even if it means poorer selection or higher prices, and will seek efficient places to live near where they work or near mass-transit routes.

So I ask... which of (1) or (2) is more likely, given what you purport to be "human nature?" The answer, of course, is (3):

(3) We all do exactly as we have done, since this oil problem isn't going to come to a head until after we're dead and gone. Well, probably not. That's what they keep telling us anyway, and we'd rather believe that.

I dunno. It really hasn't been that hard for me to survive on a bike and on my feet -- keeping in mind that I've lived in car-addicted cities without adequate mass transit -- but that's because I've been very careful to live and work in places and ways that can actually work without a car.

Doing this has required me to shape my lifestyle in specific ways, but it's never been that troublesome except for at the seams -- when my temp agency naively expects me to be able to take the job two miles away from the nearest bus route and six from my home, for example. I don't think it's required denying or changing my human nature at all.

It's really a simple choice. You can choose a car-free life now or you can sit around and whinge about how great it'd be to have hydrogen-fueled cars so that you don't feel guilty about driving your belching pollution-mobiles across town to save on some paper towels. And, until the oil and auto industries suddenly develop some sort of inexplicably altruistic raison-d'etre -- I think we can pretty much count on the best thing out there being hybrids. If you can afford those.

About $2.05 for 87 octane in Los Angeles County.

Folks, people in Europe are paying like $3.50 a gallon for the cheap stuff on a good day. I try not to sweat it too much.

p.s. I'm not tryin' to start nothin' but I don't think we need a lot of pontification in a thread like this

LOL!

If only petrol were as cheap over here.

We are now at the point at which high-octane unleaded petrol is approaching £1 per litre.

I have no idea how it translates. As I was pulling away from the theatre tonight.... 95.4 cents a litre (I'm in Canada) It's jumped two cents a litre in the past day and a half.

Just did a conversion. One litre is 0.26 of a gallon. I suck at math, but it's really outrageous.

This is why I ride my bike. I'm thankful for kickass bike trails around here.

I'm with Selador on this one - although hi-octane(98 RON?) near me's a bit cheaper at ~£0.82 a litre.

Running the numbers that's $5.65/gal.

Ow.

The news last week said New jersey has the cheapest gas in the country. Why? We have refineries here and the state tax is less on gas. And it's "Full Serve" the attendant has to dispense it) by law.

I saw $1.60.9/10 for regular yesterday and I filled up with Plus (89 octane) for $1.67.9/10.

In Arkansas, which is one of the poorest states in the country and usually doesn't get hit as hard as the rest of the country with these sorts of things is suffering too but it doesn't sound like nearly as bad. I'm paying around 1.75-1.86 a gallon for the cheap stuff. I only buy the cheap stuff. Can't afford the good gas .

I think that Opec slowing production was done as a way to punish us for Iraq, but that theroy doesn't go over very well with very many people, I wonder why?

Zana

Im bored so I decided to calculate the recent exchanges mentioned.

Per Hawk's Example
.82 GBP per 1 liter = 3.73 GBP per 4.55 liter (1 gallon)
3.73 GBP = 6.69 USD per gallon

Yuki's Example
4.29 CAD = 3.12 USD per gallon

The store on the corner where I live in Texas, its 1.71 USD

$2.09 for 89

Thanks Loki.
That'll teach me to check my l->gal conversions next time.

Doesn't help I only get about 320 miles outta my tank, either (16 gallons, allegedly).

Roll on biodiesel, though I suppose the UK government'll tax that [non-pg]loads too...

Blech.

the problem is, there are people like me... i have the greatest job in the world (imho), but a tank of a truck ('72 chevy C20) that gets 9-11MPG. the problem is the fact that i live in san francisco, and my job is in san rafael, about 20 miles away. the average price of gas (cheap s***) is $2.19 a gallon - one cheap place is currently $2.01, and some go as high as $2.29. i have to drive to and from work monday through friday, burning $5 or so in gas each way. fortunately, i happened to have found a co-worker who lives near me, who is more than happy to give me a ride if i pay the golden gate toll. it's $5 less a day for him, and $15 less a day for me. however, there are days he can't give me a ride, and i'm stuck taking my beast (i love the way it feels, but god it guzzles gas and stinks). that's about 20% of my net day's pay gone, just for transportation.

if hfc vehicles, or even hybrids, came out en masse, i would be more than willing to take out a loan to get a fuel-efficient, non (or low) polluting vehicle. the problem is, the en masse part of that statement. although hfc's and hybrids are being made, they aren't being mass produced. when production quantities go up, production costs (per unit) go down. until then though, these clean vehicles will be out of my league, even with a loan.

Hm.

I, good sir, will pontificate exactly as I please.

*skzzt*

I'm jus' sayin', y'know. 'sall.

$1.86/gallon in florida panhandle

I actually empathize with your situation, Phil. I'm a musician in a small, sparsely-populated state, so when I tend to get work, it tends to be far away. Usually I have to carpool to get to them, or rent a car if no one local is going.

I'm not trying to be militant about it; I'm just trying to say it's a choice. The reason that we live twenty miles from our dream jobs (I live about fifty away from one of mine) is that institutions have allowed us and encouraged us to live this way. In my case, for example, we have split resources between two smaller cities; a major university in one, a major symphony in the other; a thriving downtown community in one, a pleasant and affordable residential community in the other. People commute between these two cities daily and regularly, for work or for play. There has been talk about establishing a commuter train along any of the few corridors that exist between the two cities.

BUT. What we're doing instead is widening the interstate between them from two lanes to three. And it's not even like we get LA-style congestion around here. To be honest, I'm completely stumped as to why we need three-lane highways between the two cities; I figure at most it will offer speeders the opportunity to bypass more traffic and to swerve across more lanes. *shrugs*

In other words, the people of NE have made a choice. They'd rather have speedy highways than mass transit between the two cities. And so, commuters will continue to be forced to drive. And since they can drive, it will become increasingly likely that firms will locate themselves farther away from the talent and customer pools on which they draw, in one city or the other. If the situation were different -- if there were a commuter rail and people tended not to want to use their cars much -- you can bet that firms would locate themselves more conveniently. Or if they didn't, their competitors would.

But like I said, this is just my wacky bike-ridin' philosophy. I go out on the roads, and it seems that just about everyone is sitting alone in their two-ton, four-to-six-seated vehicles. It seems a horrific waste to me, horribly inefficient, and it just strikes me that it ain't necessarily so.