This 4-dollar gas thing
By Karina | June 11, 2008
American’s are well aware these days that we’ve hit 4-dollar gas recently. It’s all anyone is talking about - ever! It’s all over the news, next to the water cooler, and at the gas pumps. And as unlikely as it ever seemed to be, it seems like the SUV has finally started to croak as an all-purpose family vehicle.
One of the most common things to talk about at the water cooler is how much people are paying at the pump. NPR has done a couple of stories about how expensive gasoline is, but they always talk about how much each tank of gas costs. I’ve had people pull up next to me and ask me how much I pay for gas - and I want to tell them “I pay exactly as much as you do per gallon, but I buy a lot less.” A Ford Expedition has a tank capacity of 28 gallons - I guess when you’ve got a car that goes 14 miles per gallon that’s necessary to get anywhere without constantly stopping for gas - so at $4 a gallon an Expedition driver is paying $112 to fill up a tank. A Camry driver, on the other hand, has a tank capacity of 18.5 gallons (which is really big, don’t you think?) so they’re putting $74 worth of 4-dollar gas into their car. So the Ford Expedition driver has a bigger hardship, you know? I pay about $40 to fill up my 10.4 gallon tank.
A study came out recently evaluating the percentage of a family’s income spent on fuel - there’s a wonderful graphic at the NYTimes. The idea of talking about the percent of your income you’re paying for fuel is a much smarter way to look at fuel prices - it totally disregards tank size and gets straight to the question of how these prices are affecting people. However, it doesn’t provide a solution. You all know by now that the Official Tiny Choices energy policy includes CONSERVATION as the primary wonderful, cheap, and renewable source of energy. So I have a better idea:
Instead of talking about cost per tank, or even percentage of income you pay for gasoline, how about we all start talking about dollars per mile. Sounds good, right? This normalizes the discussion by getting rid of the variety of gas tank sizes. It also helps people to discuss how much they’re spending on gas without making assumptions about their income, or what their other expenses are. It will require a little more calculation, but we all have calculators on our cell phones these days, so let’s give it a shot. Here is an example math problem:
- Say you drive a Ford Expedition. Gas is $4 a gallon, and you get 14 miles per gallon. To calculate the dollars per mile, you have to divide the number of miles you go on each gallon of gas by the cost of gas. So an Expedition driver would say: 14 miles per gallon divided by $4 = 3.5 miles per dollar.
- Now say you drive a Toyota Camry. You get 25 miles per gallon, so you calculate 25 miles per gallon divided by $4 = 6.25 miles per dollar.
- So let’s try the gold standard: the Toyota Prius. You get 46 miles per gallon, so if you calculate your miles per dollar you get 11.5 miles per dollar.
Isn’t that interesting? If you drive an Expedition and you want to drive down to the corner store that is a few miles away, round trip will cost you a couple of bucks. I get roughly 16 miles per dollar, so my 30+ mile-one-way-commute to work is a couple of bucks each way. I have never thought of my commute in those terms. It seems a little more expensive than I thought it would be saying I use 1-gallon of gas a day is one thing, but to use $4 of gas a day? it’s a good thing I don’t drink expensive coffee drinks.
Do you drive? what’s your miles per dollar? How do you feel about your commute now?
Photo from flickr user Fr1zz via creative commons license.
Topics: Transportation |
aw, my sweet little honda civic only gets about 8 miles to the dollar … but i love my car, it’s not the ‘worst’ car on the road by any stretch, and i’m just not ready to buy a new one. AND, lately, the husband and i have been really trying to carpool more often … we are definitely getting better as his huge tundra truck only gets about 4 miles to the dollar (ick!).
maybe one of these days i’ll be brave enough to carpool with him on the motorcycle (approx. 15 miles to the dollar!)
i do love the TC approach and especially the example math problem!
as for how i feel about my commute … oh, if i could only find a way to NOT commute!! ;)
the next step is to carpool and then to calculate your miles per dollar per person!
I have a Honda CRV, and love it for dragging around all my art/camp supplies. However, this week, I have decided to start riding my bike to work. I drive approximately 4 miles to work, and only fill up about once every 2.5 weeks. I figure I can go about 5-6 miles on a dollar.
My husband drives a 93 Corolla and gets about 7 miles to a dollar. But he drives 45 miles one way to work every day.
But every time I bike to work, I think, I just saved $2.00 today on gas. And it makes me feel really good about riding my bike and showing up to work all sweaty and gross :)
Plus, with him HAVING to drive to work (there’s not even a carpool option), I feel that my teeny tiny contribution helps out with the finances as well as the economic impact we have.
that is great that you can bike to work, and it definately adds up.
Hmm. My Civic gets about 30mpg the way I drive to work — a combo of local and highway driving. My job is about 12 miles away. Gas up the street was $4.07 yesterday, which is practically a Christmas miracle; it had been closer to $4.20 since before Memorial Day. So it costs, if my calculations are correct, about $1.63 each way.
Yeah, it really sucks when I put it that way.
I guess I shouldn’t complain too much — my husband has a much longer commute that he takes by train, so we save money that way. My commute is relatively short compared to a lot of people, and my car is efficient for not being a hybrid.
I keep thinking about how, when I was in college (and drove a much less efficient hand-me-down vehicle) I would put five bucks of gas in because that was all I could afford. That definitely wouldn’t get me very far any more.
when I wrote this post I kind of sat up - my possible commute to work on public transit takes 2 hours and is $13 each way… and when I add in my $5/day tolls I’m at $9 for driving. it’s amazing that the break-even point is getting so close!
I do own a car, but I drive it very little. I filled up my tank on May 1st and still have a few more miles to go before I hit E. I have a fairly fuel efficient Honda Accord, but since almost all of the driving I do is stop-and-go city driving I will only get about 5 miles/dollar when I fill up my tank. That doesn’t sound very good, but I take into consideration that if I buy 15 gallons of gas every 30 days, I am burning about 0.5 gallons/day, or $2/day.
As for my commute, I feel great about it. I get about infinity miles/dollar on my Schwinn bicycle. :)
infinity miles per dollar is the best!
Let’s also not forget that there isn’t an oil shortage going on. No long lines and alternating days like the 1970s. The price is $4.00 a gallon because oil companies simply want to make even more billions. It’s quite a social experiment…almost as if Big Oil wants to see precisely how addicted to the automobile culture we truly are.
Actually the govt makes more money off a gallon of gas then the oil company. New York alone makes 60.4 cents a gallon while a oil comapny makes between 8-12 cents a gallon.
Who is sticking it to who?
Our miles per gallon is between 6.25 - 6.5
our gas prices seem to be higher than most of the country (4.49/gal yesterday), so my car is getting about 6.9 miles/dollar. good thing i work less than ten miles from home.
i really miss the gas prices from the 80s. less than a buck a gallon! oh, i guess everything was cheaper then, huh.
$4 gas is because of tight supplies as well as the plummeting US Dollar. If oil companies knew what was in their interests, they’d use their profits to diversify or become energy companies of which oil was one component.
Don’t forget to include vehicle depreciation into the dollars per mile calculation! It makes the case for an economical used car even more compelling. Don’t buy new or even gently used unless you plan to keep the car for a 8 to 10 year time frame.
An unscientific scan of craiglist cars for sale tells me that SUV owners are desperate to gid rid of their trucks - which makes little sense because it amounts to taking a hit amounting to thousands, possibly ten thousand dollars, in order to save about $150 per month. Are people so tightly leveraged that they need to get the monthly expenses down? I’m considering getting a used SUV for hauling if my life becomes a never ending sequence of Home Depot runs after moving to my new place. My commute isn’t long, and I’d keep it for the next 10-15 years as a hauler and beater car. Someone’s SUV miscalculation can be my opportunity to get a useful vehicle at a bargain price.
I get about 6.5-6.9 miles to my dollar with my older saturn stick shift, but I hope to improve that with my soon-to-be-new-accord stick. we’ll see.
That said, I think the husband and I fill the car up maybe once a month, occasionally twice a month, depending on what we’ve been doing. We share the one car, both work in NYC commuting in via train, and live in walking distance to the train station. Otherwise, I have no idea what we’d end up doing!
Good job. Here’s mine…
http://isledance.blogspot.com/2008/06/what-are-you-paying-for-gasoline.html
my civic gets decent gas mileage, but with our gas at about $4.50, i only get 5.8 miles per dollar. thinking about it this way makes a lot more sense to me, and hopefully will convince my husband to drive less too. at least we only fill up the tank about every three weeks. thanks for laying it out like this!
when i first started driving i could fill up a gas tank for ten bucks. whoa.
it makes a lot more sense to walk down to the store if you area near enough rather than driving when you know exactly how many dollars of gas you’ll be spending.
Utimately high gas prices are a good thing - nothing else will force us to conserve and get serious about workable public transportation. The difference between now and the 70s is that high fuel prices will be here for a long time to come - whatever demand destruction we see in the USA and the developed world will be soaked up by China, India, and the Middle East.
About 2 weeks ago I sold my only car, which was a ford ranger truck that got about 27 miles per gallon. I now have my feet for transportatiobn until I get my recycled part bike made :) My feet are free and I am so glad I don’t have to think of gasoline in regards to filling up my tank anymore. This post is a real eye opener when you calculate how much it costs just to drive to the corner store.
exactly! I also like how we can totally change our mileage by driving more conservatively, which increases the number of miles per dollar we get from our cars.
This is a good way to think of my fuel use. And I’ll use it next time friends assume I should always drive because I get better mileage.
I get 13 miles per dollar and my daily commute is about a dollar a day so I’m still a ways from matching the bus at $3.50 - $6.00 per day but a lot closer than I used to be. There is a benefit — I bring my lunch a lot more rather than driving to a restaurant and I improvise dinner rather than driving to the store for a forgotten ingredient. I’m eating cheaper and healthier!
I don’t have a car and rarely rent a Zip Car. Mostly I take public transit or walk. I’ve noticed the increasing gas prices reflected indirectly in the prices of other things. And , like Joanthan, I also hope that the prices will encourage people to conserve, in more ways than just driving. We need to be buying less in general.
More important than mpg or any other measure of fuel efficiency is how much you drive and for most people that translates into the question of how far do you commute. When you first see someone driving a Prius, you think “great”! But then you realize that person is commuting 40 miles roundtrip and lives in a McMansion…boo! Next time you see someone driving a Hummer, don’t boo them. What if their commute is only 2 miles roundtrip from a small apartment? In that case, the Hummer is greener than the Prius!
The water cooler conversation really should be about your total carbon footprint. Looks can be deceiving. Being green is about the total package of consumer and lifestyle choices not just about what you drive.
I agree Tommy. It’s not a simple issue of “Prius good” and “Hummer bad”, although the Hummer symbolizes the raw excess that has defined American culture. The biggest issue I see is that all of us, apart from residents of cities with good transit systems, have to drive everywhere to do anything, no matter what we drive.
I agree that this is the the better way to look at things, and that hopefully higher gas prices will encourage people to conserve.
But it was still shocking to see what my commute is costing me. Given that my commute is about 9 miles roundtrip, and I drive a Prius, it is really good at only about $1.00 (I don’t get the 46 mpg*), but I didn’t even think it was that much.
* usually about 41 per tank, but the commute part is about 39-40.
[…] This 4-dollar gas thingAmerican’s are well aware these days that we’ve hit 4-dollar gas recently. It’s all anyone is talking about - ever! It’s all over the news, next to the water cooler, and at the gas pumps. And as unlikely as it ever seemed to be, …Tiny Choices - http://tinychoices.com […]
[…] This 4-dollar gas thingAmerican’s are well aware these days that we’ve hit 4-dollar gas recently. It’s all anyone is talking about - ever! It’s all over the news, next to the water cooler, and at the gas pumps. And as unlikely as it ever seemed to be, …Tiny Choices - http://tinychoices.com […]
I get about 4.2 miles per dollar, but seeing at gas here is about $5.50/gallon (Victoria, Canada), that’s not too bad. My commute to work is about 3 miles, so that’s not too bad either. I’d still get a scooter if I could afford one.
Just a quick comment from the over side of the pond..
Here in the uk we are currently paying upto £1.29 per litre.
that works out as $11.45 per gallon. So when you see this figure, life cannot be that bad…
Hey A.Pearce– well, that certainly does put things into a bit more perspective, so thanks– and ya’ll have been paying much higher prices for much longer, so you must be further along on how to deal with it than we are. We’ve got some learning to do– in a way, it’s *finally* teaching folks to combine trips, use alternate transportation when possible, etc…
I would also add that in the UK there is much more public transportation available. so while you are paying $12 a gallon, it is much easier to make the shift to public transit if you’re previously-wedded to your car. I would estimate (this is ENTIRELY unscientific) that most people in the USA live over 5 miles away from public transportation. This poor urban planning is one of the big and slow changes that will need to happen over the next while!