[Pittsburgh] gas prices

[cellio]

Tonight I saw a 35-cent span of gas prices (!). No, I don't mean from the cheap stuff to the expensive stuff; I mean the same stuff at different stations. So don't just take the first thing you see.

Oakland (Blvd of the Allies): $2.83
Squirrel Hill (Beacon and Murray): $2.96
Regent Square (Braddock and W. Hutchinson, and the BP down the hill): $2.61.

I'm glad I bought groceries tonight; otherwise I would have had no reason to venture into Regent Square. Mind, I didn't need to fill up yet (tank was a bit over a quarter full), but knowing that prices will only go up in the short term and I'd need to do it soon, I figured that if I saw a good price I'd take it.

Yeah, I just called $2.61 a good price.

Under normal conditions I fill up about once a month, so maybe if I'm lucky the spike will come and go before I'm directly affected. Indirectly, of course, we'll all be affected; they can't raise fares for public transit quickly, but the price of just about anything you buy that has to get from somewhere else to the store is going to rise.

Comments

[macbeaner.livejournal.com]

Sad thing is-in Washington, PA it's up to 2.99 a gallon. My dad heard somewhere that BP was holding their prices-I don't know how true it is though.


(I saw your link on Pittsburgh Bloggers)

[cellio]

Wow. They'll probably be pulling out the "3"s overnight, then.

There's another BP in my neighborhood, but I didn't drive past it tonight. Next time I do I'll check their price. If they are holding their price, the place 3 blocks away charging $2.96 might have made an unwise move.

(Hi. Welcome!)

[magid.livejournal.com]

I just filled my tank Sunday, $2.59/gallon. It really hit me: this was the first time I'd paid more than $20 for a tank of gas. I'm hoping that by the next time I fill the tank, whatever spike will have come and gone, too.

[cellio]

My previous fill-up was before Pennsic, when I think I paid $2.29. I was surprised when I came home from Pennsic to see that prices had gone up about 20 cents just in the time I was gone.

(I write down everything that happens to the car in a log book, including fill-ups so I have a chance of noticing trends affecting mileage. But I've never written down prices; who would have thought that sort of data would ever be interesting?)

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

I have a PDA app that tracks price, volume and mileage. The app itself will give me a &/m figure (about 6 cents), but I have to export the data to Excel if I want true $/gal. analysis.

www.gasbuddy.com is your friend. Near the lower left of the page they have a configureable graph of historical prices. Quite the eye-opener, actually.

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

That should be $/mi.

Ampersands per meter would be a lexical measure of run-on sentence length while in motion. Kinda like walking while chewing gum, which would be measured in mastications per stride.

[magid.livejournal.com]

*laugh*

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

I have way too much time on my hands.

Walking while chewing gum tends towards a hyperbolic function. That is, lots of steps and little chewing or lots of chewing and few steps both indicate difficulty. Values between .25 and 4 indicate competence.

Walking while chewing gum also appears to have a relationship with foot-in-mouth disease. Unfortunately the only measure we have for this is (obviously) feet per mouth. For humans this has ordinal values of 0/1, 1/1 and 2/1.

[magid.livejournal.com]

It sounds like at least one of these could be called a step function.

[cellio]

*smile*

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

My hybrid holds 10.2 gallons. Up until this month I've seldom gone over $23 per fill-up. Now it's above $28. I'm able to go on average 400+ miles per tank, but, still....

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Filled tank on Monday evening, $2.59/gal. (Drove to our out-of-state corporate hq on Tuesday.) Filled tank on Wednesday evening, $2.79/gal. I drove right on by the station near the interstate where regular was 2.999 and Plus was over $3.

I usually buy gas 3-4 times a month unless I have to go to company headquarters. Realistically, that's 20 cents x 10 gallons a fill-up, not a hard hit to my purse, yet, not even one grande latte a week. But $3 gas does make me think twice about out of town pleasure trips like Coronation or Kingdom Crusades.

[paquerette.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think this is really going to hit SCA events hard. We're scaling back from planning on 3 events this month to 1, and probably nothing else the rest of the fall.

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

I've stopped going to events. I'm regretful, but on no income and living on my savings, I can't afford it. Most events I have to take my van to, and it gets 22 mpg. If I can use the Hybrid, which gets 45 mpg, it's almost acceptable, but might mean I have to stay in a hotel. I'm stuck no matter what.

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

We are at $3.18 for premium and $2.98 for regular now. This changed overnight between Monday and Tuesday.

[akitrom.livejournal.com]

I think the reason the prices are all across the board is:

* people know that the price is going to be "high"
* people will buy gasoline at any price, really.

And the vendors are trying to come to some sort of consensus as to how high is "high enough." I've seen differences of $.75 per gallon between gas stations on opposite corners of the same intersection.

It's a seller's market. There's no reason for gas not to sell for $4.25 tomorrow. Enough people already think it's plausible, and that's all we need.

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

The scarry thing is by the standards of a lot of places this is still cheap. I think in the UK it works out to about $5/us gallon, here in Israel I think its about the same. (I don't have a car, so I don't really pay attention)

[cellio]

Yes, US gas prices are cheap compared to many places. The difference between the US and elsewhere is that we'll keep driving anyway instead of improving mass transit, and eventually people will scream and the government -- doing what government does to solve any problem -- will try to regulate even more, making a bigger mess in the end. Whee.

[blackpaladin.livejournal.com]

I went over to Margaret's for a heraldry meeting tonight. When I left my house at about 6:45, the BP at Murray and Forward was at $2.599. When I came back 3.5 hours later (10:15), the price had gone up 10 cents. I was very glad I'd filled up my tank last night.

[cellio]

When we were in Toronto in April we saw some gas stations with digital price displays (rather than the signboards we're used to). There was one station that had a different price every time we drove past it. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing those here; you could then write a script to monitor whatever inputs you consider relevant and update your prices automatically.

Gas prices

[anniemal.livejournal.com]

I saw $3.099 for regular on a gas station in Bethesda yesterday. When we came out of Pennsic, we thought $2.59 was high. Guess Leviathan can stay emptyish for awhile. Mazda was filled @ $2.21, and still has 3/4's of that. Mazda only needs 1/4 tank to do Baltimore and home. Shopping and other errands take less. We're coasting. This gas price madness will maybe subside, I hope. I remember when it was $.399 a gallon, and shortage was an absurdity.:-)

And please, people

[anniemal.livejournal.com]

Ditch the irritating stupid moving icons. Please?

Re: And please, people

[magid.livejournal.com]

Seconded.

I've liked yours for a while, though.

[brokengoose.livejournal.com]

Apparently, a lot of the problem is speculation on the part of the gas stations.

They know that the next time they fill their tanks, it'll cost more. Consequently, they're trying to put their prices somewhere in between "reasonable profit for this tank" and "reasonable profit for the next tank". They're doing this because they don't want to suddenly raise prices by $1.00 ('cause even if it's justified, we don't really have a free market, and they'll be accused of gouging).

Costco has gas pumps and a store policy of "max 15% mark-up over our price". The guy at the pumps yesterday was saying that he'd been going nuts trying to figure out what their wholesale price was. The wholesale price was jumping around by more than $1/gallon over a span of a few hours.

[goljerp]

On Wednesday evening, I paid $3.15/gallon for regular unleaded. This was in New York City (the, um, Exxon at 96th and West End Avenue), and if I wasn't in a big rush to move and driving a rental car, I would never have gotten gas there... but I was, and I did. I am so glad I don't own a car!

[magid.livejournal.com]

Just found a place that will graph gas prices for the last 3 years in different cities, though you'd be interested.
http://www.newyorkgasprices.com/retail_price_chart.aspx