May 9, 2006
Gas prices getting cruder
Two years ago I wrote a column that began, “My local gas station ran out of the number ‘2.’ The ‘2s’ came right after the dollar sign. I guess even the station owner wasn’t prepared for gas prices to shoot past $2.”
The column ended with what was supposed to be a small joke: “If you should happen to see a gas station owner shopping for the number ‘3,’ we’re all in a lot of trouble.”
I don’t know how funny this was two years ago, but it’s sure not funny now. With gas prices hovering around $3 a gallon, we’re all asking if there is a short-term fix. There is no major fix to high prices, but there a few small, local steps that can be taken.
First of all, gasoline in Washington does cost more than in other parts of the country. Our retail prices are about 10 cents above the national average. Of this, higher taxes account for about 3.5 cents per gallon. So we’re paying the gas companies about 6.5 cents per gallon more than consumers elsewhere. We have higher prices, but not by enough to be a big deal. Frankly, it’s not the last nickel or dime per gallon that bothers me—it’s the last buck or buck and a half a gallon that’s the problem.
The second fact is that the price of gasoline is mostly determined by the price of crude oil, which accounted for about half the price of gasoline back when gas ran $2 a gallon. Since the oil-price half has since about doubled, we might expect an additional dollar per gallon in cost of gasoline at retail. That’s pretty much what’s happened.
This calculation is pretty rough. But it does tell us that most of the higher price we pay at the pump reflects higher crude-oil prices over which we have little immediate influence.
In the short run, there’s probably nothing Washington, D.C., can do about the price of crude oil. There’s surely nothing Washington state can do.
Since it’s not realistic to hope to lower the price of gasoline, we should concentrate on helping people use less.
When it comes to government involvement, this means finding solutions that are hard for people to implement for themselves. The last thing Washingtonians need is to be scolded on the value of car-pooling or driving smoothly to improve mileage. At $3 a gallon, we’re pretty good at figuring those things out without the lecture.
But there are things the state could do quickly at modest expense. Add long-haul commuter buses. Add buses to meet the ferries. Add buses from the park-and-rides. You can’t get people all the way door-to-door easily, but thousands of Washingtonians could be saved 30-to-50- mile daily commute legs straight down the highway.
Doing this will probably cost the state a bit of money, but by targeting commuters with the longest, gas-guzzling trips, we can get some relief to those hit hardest by the higher gas prices. We could easily promise extra buses between now and Labor Day as an emergency measure. We can decide later on whether to keep them.
Here’s another little thing that either the state or local governments could do. Buy a bunch of portable tire pumps. Hire high-school kids to go out to the park-and-rides, out to the ferries, the casinos, and the shopping center parking lots and offer to check proper inflation for drivers and to squirt air in as needed right on the spot. Properly inflated tires improve mileage—modestly anyhow—and outdoor summer jobs for kids aren’t a bad thing either.
Along the same line, with a little training, the summer kids could check for clogged air filters and replace them at cost. Clogged air filters aren’t as common as under-inflated tires, but replacing a clogged filter helps mileage a lot. It’s roughly the equivalent of dropping gas prices 30 cents a gallon.
We can’t solve the $3 a gallon gas problem, but we can easily do some modest damage control. And we ought to get on it.
