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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: Gas prices in your area - Update
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 03-06-2011 05:29 PM
quote: Alan Plester
Dearest so far in this neck of the woods is £1.32 petrol/£1.38diesel p/l on the news the other day some garages were retailing @ £1.43 and higher, in the real northern areas, so glad i got my car converted to lpg, i am now shelling out 0.75 litr.
It's around £1.28 for petrol in York and Leeds. One of the advantages of living in this neck of the woods is that petrol is a little less than the average; but even so, £1.28 is not nice!
My last car had an LPG system in it, but by the time I got rid of it the saving was marginal at best. At that time (mid-2007), LPG was around 45p a litre and petrol around 80p. Given that you use about a quarter more of the actual substance (so a car that gives you 40mpg on petrol will give you around 30 on LPG), I reckon I was getting the equivalent of petrol at around 65p or so; but when you add on the cost of an annual service for the LPG system, more like 70p. I probably saved around £100 a year on fuel if that. I reckon that you'd have to be driving at least 20k miles a year for LPG to make sense, assuming that you're paying to have the system factory-fitted or aftermarket-installed yourself (I didn't: I bought my LPG car secondhand and already converted); and if you are driving that much, diesel probably makes even more sense.
quote: Steve Guttag
The realities are...there is but so much money a worker has and the demand will drop (in fact, I already see a reduced amount of traffic...just like the last time gas prices spiked). If one can not reduce their driving (have to go to work) then other things in the economy will suffer (like cinemas) since after paying for gas, folks have less money for discretionary activities.
And not only that, but the cost of all goods and services that require road transport to produce are also going to go up. So even if you don't own a car, you will be hit in the wallet by rising fuel costs every time you go to the supermarket, have someone come to your house to fix something, etc. etc.
quote: Hillary Charles
Might not jet fuel suffer similar price hikes, prompting the increases in air fares?
Such a lot of flying is discretionary (i.e. done for leisure purposes, and people can choose not to if the price is too high) that I'd have thought that there's only so far you can put the ticket price up before you start to get demand destruction. Surprisingly, I'm starting to look around for flights for a trip to California in mid-May, and am finding that they're around £200 cheaper than the ticket I bought for the exact same journey in January! Given that May is approaching the peak season and late January should be around the cheapest time of the year to travel, my only guess at a reason is that the airlines are having to lower prices in order to fill seats. I was certainly shocked at how empty the planes in January were: the transatlantic flights in both directions were only a third to half full, and I got a whole row to myself, both ways!
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-06-2011 06:24 PM
quote: Hillary Charles
Might not jet fuel suffer similar price hikes, prompting the increases in air fares?
Probably. Although higher fares on top of the price increases airlines have been delivering already will eventually cause passenger numbers to drop. The airlines have to do what they can keep enough customers going through those gates to maintain a certain amount of cash flow. They have to try to pass along the higher costs of jet fuel, but if the customers can't afford the price they don't fly and then the airline's business goes into the toilet.
The term "stay-cation" has grown more popular lately. I don't think the term has been around very long. The first time I heard it was back when oil was roaring toward $150 per barrel not long ago.
quote: Tom Petrov
I am going to argue the other way. The American economy can survive or sustain it if the change.
Tom, that's wishful thinking. The change or adaptation you're talking about doesn't happen immedately. It certainly doesn't happen as a means of preventing an economic down turn. People only adapt and change when that becomes unavoidably necessary -usually after experiencing serious financial pain and learning the hard way.
Gasoline prices going North of $4.00 per gallon a couple years ago were the very thing that pushed the American economy into a deep recession. The American people were pushing their luck worse and worse living lifestyles they could not afford. Then those gas prices skyrocketed throwing Americans a terrible curve ball that couldn't be hit. They didn't have the extra positive cash flow to be able to afford those higher prices. Many were already way over their heads in debt.
The current economic recovery is shaky at best. Wall Street is doing better, but that's only an indication of how big business is doing in the overall global economy. It is not an indicator of the American economy doing well. Unemployment is still high. The housing market is still in the toilet. The commercial real estate market is not doing well. Incomes in the middle and lower classes are stagnant and not keeping up with inflation.
So if we get hit with $5 per gallon gasoline we can look forward to another recession hitting pretty fast.
Historically, when the price of gasoline hit new record high prices it preceeded a recession in the US. Gasoline isn't the only thing causing the recession but it is a pretty reliable barometer.
quote: Tom Petrov
It was also argued and agreed that small towns will thrive if they are located on a railway or abandoned railway line. We will see a return of small town manufacturiing so it was claimed.
Rail is too expensive and not convenient enough for passenger use in rural and small town areas. When the automobile was invented it spelled the end of the horse and buggy culture and put rail on a downward trend. Rail can only return to certain areas where population density is high enough to support it.
Globalization has killed manufacturing in many areas of the United States. So why bother with building new frieght lines into small towns that are already dying? I don't see a bunch of bolt turner jobs returning to small towns. Factories in developing countries don't have to deal with costs of workers comp insurance, social security, medicare, complying with regulations from OSHA, EPA, DOT, etc. The only thing that can save manufacturing in the United States is shipping costs that rise enough to take away the financial advantage of building so many things overseas.
So many small towns are stuck in a death spiral. The young people are bored, don't have enough job opportunities and don't have enough of a social life. They leave for bigger towns and leave behind an aging population with fewer full time workers and more retirees. The property tax base shrinks. Add to that the inflation costs on so many city services and it just spells long term doom for many small towns.
High fuel prices will result in more development within city centers and less out in suburbs and small towns. Someone looking to build a new factory has to make the choice on where to build a lot more carefully.
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James Westbrook
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1133
From: Lubbock, Texas, Usa
Registered: Mar 2006
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posted 03-07-2011 01:12 AM
At $6 a gallon, the elderly would take fewer trips to their favorite cafeteria, their matinee movies, to visit their friends. I know a few of you would argue that you want the elderly off the roads, but without them our matinee business would crash on school days.
For the rest of us, fast food places would take a hit as going through the drive-thru doesn't sound so enticing - assuming all the money wasn't used to fill up the tank so one could get to work and back. Unless they lived within walking distance, but the restaurants can't sustain on just foot traffic.
I, too, am a listener of Coast to Coast AM, but I'm selective in what to believe. I disagree with that guest: $6 a gallon of gas WILL ruin the economy. The logic that we would "be forced to look into alternatives" is , my wording, "pie in the sky." There would not be enough capital to get these alternatives going.
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James Westbrook
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1133
From: Lubbock, Texas, Usa
Registered: Mar 2006
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posted 03-07-2011 03:45 AM
I am fortunate that I live within walking distance of a grocery store, a mailbox, several fast food restaurants - including a Sonic Drive-in - a chain drug store, a somewhat over-priced hardware store, and a few shops. I did more of this when my main vehicle was a 1982 Chevrolet S-10 pickup, which has over 200,000 miles on it and does 10 MPG. It was unreliable enough that I was mapping a walking route to my theater and back, which is roughly 3 miles one way. I even looked into getting a bicycle.
Instead I got a 2011 Nissan Versa. The base version with automatic transmission. 25mpg in the city. Much more reliable transportation, and cheaper than a hybrid. 4 trips to work and back = 1 gallon of gas. Safer than a bicycle, and I can listen to Coast to Coast AM on the way home at night.
However, most of my coworkers are not as fortunate. They live farther from the theater, and like you would have to look for closer jobs. Some live further away from a grocery store. They have to drive further than I do. Some are already working two jobs, and have to drive their children to school. The way cities and towns are laid out, driving is pretty much the only way to get around.
With the economy in it's current state, cities can not afford to purchase more buses and passenger rail service is not an option.
I'm glad we are both fortunate that we can walk to get some beer, or milk, or bread but most of the people around us aren't.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-07-2011 08:52 AM
quote: Tom Petrov
As for the big chains, high fuel prices are going to make them buy local. I mean, why I am buying produce from out of province when it could be grown locally for my local market.
You can't grow most fruits and vegetables just anywhere, certainly not in the volumes necessary to be competitive in price much less satisfy demand. Same thing goes for livestock. Any sort of agricultural business requires giant amounts of wide open, rural land. That kind of space can't be fit within urban greenhouses on a cost effective basis.
Weather patterns, sunlight amounts, differing soil types and other factors make it necessary for grocery stores to buy many produce items from distant places that can grow a certain item in volume. You're not going to grow Florida oranges and Idaho potatoes next to each other in some city greenhouse without the resulting product costing too much money and probably not being very good at all.
We have a local farmer's market where people sell their home grown produce to others. It's great stuff, a lot better than what you can buy at Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, the range of food products sold is limited to what can be grown locally and the market is only open a limited time of year. Full time grocery stores have to operate year round.
Thanks to companies like Wal-Mart more and more of the produce Americans buy is imported from other countries. A great deal of the beef we buy is produced in Mexico. Lots of American ranchers have been seriously hurt by price speculation on wheat, corn and other produce grown to feed cattle. The price of hay has been brutal to anyone who owns horses (like my parents). Who knows what stocker steers are being fed south of the border? Here in the US the rules are a little more strict.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 03-08-2011 11:32 AM
quote: Bobby Henderson
Rail is too expensive and not convenient enough for passenger use in rural and small town areas. When the automobile was invented it spelled the end of the horse and buggy culture and put rail on a downward trend. Rail can only return to certain areas where population density is high enough to support it.
As a sidebar, rail transport has not been commercially viable anywhere in Europe for the best part of a century now. For example, Germany's railways were nationalised in 1920, France's in 1938 and ours in 1947. Basically, as soon as cheaper and more flexible alternatives came along (i.e. cars and planes), rail was rendered obsolete. Even though since 1997 we've gone back to a sort of half-public, half-private system (the government owns track and infrastructure, which private, franchise-holding operators run trains on), the bottom line is that without tens of billions of taxpayers' money being pumped into the system each year, there would be no railway. I once heard the staggering figure that without any public subsidy, the true cost of a return ticket from York to London (around 500 miles in total) would be in the region of £1,500 - enough for two return flights to California, or 20,000 miles by air! Defenders of that subsidy claim that you'll get that money back again through economic growth (and thus tax receipts) in the areas served by the trains; opponents say that you can stimulate that growth by much cheaper means, e.g. more roads.
The last time I took a train in Britain was in 2005, and the last time I used them in any way regularly was before I learnt to drive. I know no-one other than London commuters who travel by train regularly.
If the oil price stays high, the alternatives will start to be used on a significant scale. I was reading an article a few months ago about Richard Branson opening up an algal biofuel plant to produce synthetic fuel for his planes. He claims that if the R & D goes well, then in 2-3 years he'll be able to produce jet fuel for an equivalent cost to the conventional stuff with oil at $160 a barrel. So simple economics dictates that if the oil price hits that sort of level and stays there, then this will become viable. It seems to me that no-one has had any incentive to develop serious scale alternatives to oil, because until now oil has always been cheaper (excepting short-term spikes). If that changes, then so will the whole rules of the game.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-08-2011 07:12 PM
According to an article I read on the Bloomberg web site, Wal-Mart hasn't been doing so great lately and the rising gasoline prices has forced the company to downgrade earnings forecasts.
quote: Mike Blakesley
So the next logical step for WalMart, if they want to continue with their plan to destroy all the small businesses in America, is to start building Micro-Super-Centers in small towns.
I'm not sure they'll even have to bother. The bigger plan seems to be destroying all the small towns and pushing those residents into bigger towns and cities where Wal-Mart already has super center locations.
A lot of my dad's family members lived in Temple, OK -a really small town about a 45 minute drive South of Lawton. I have an aunt and uncle who are the only relatives left there now. All of my first cousins from that side of the family live in big cities (Dallas, Colorado Springs, Denver, Minneapolis). My brother lives outside of Atlanta. The situation in Temple hasn't been very good lately. The school there is reeling from budget cuts. The town can hardly to afford to repair any damaged streets, sewers or water mains. They have no police department anymore; the city council let go the last cop they had a couple years ago. Now they have to rely on the Cotton County Sheriff's department, which is already stretched thin. Most of the people who live in Temple are older and on very fixed incomes. They can't afford any hikes on property taxes or sales taxes. The town isn't having much of any luck attracting new businesses which bring along new employees and taxpayers. The town is slowly dying. This same situation is repeating itself in hundreds of other small towns across the country.
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