Gasoline prices in Maine rise 5.1 cents in last week. (Portland: apartments, transporting)

[roadrat]

Originally Posted by Coaster

Hey, no sweat. We've all had it happen to us before. I've been both the taken and the takee in the past!

ETA: Prices up another 3 cents yesterday, now $3.759 in my area of the midcoast.

$3.79 in Augusta this morning



bill

[Coaster]

Originally Posted by roadrat

$3.79 in Augusta this morning



bill

Whoa! And Augusta prices, in my experience, have usually been 4-5 cents below prices here on the coast, especially when the legislature is in session. I always figured the gasoline suppliers were giving the legislators a break!

[AustinB]

Originally Posted by Coaster

Whoa! And Augusta prices, in my experience, have usually been 4-5 cents below prices here on the coast, especially when the legislature is in session. I always figured the gasoline suppliers were giving the legislators a break!

3.76 in Blue Hill yesterday

[tcrackly]

$3.75 in North Berwick yesterday. If this keeps up some of us will not have wages enough to cover getting back and forth to work, let alone our household expenses.


homelessness, then anarchy?

[Coaster]

Originally Posted by tcrackly

$3.75 in North Berwick yesterday. If this keeps up some of us will not have wages enough to cover getting back and forth to work, let alone our household expenses.


homelessness, then anarchy?

Well, you have to figure that for some people commuting costs are eating significant portions of their take-home pay. For someone driving 25 miles each way in a vehicle that gets 25 mpg, that's $7.50 a day in gasoline alone at $3.75 a gallon. So right off the bat, anyone earning under about $12 an hour (before taxes) is spending the first hour of work every day just paying for gas.

And that doesn't count all the other vehicle expenses - oil changes, repairs, tires, insurance, registration ...

[mainebrokerman]

3.69 in berlin new hampshire today and 3.85 in western maine

[221B]

4.49 for Regular here on the Left Coast, SoCal.

5.00/gal here in some places.

Red alert…! Battle stations, battle stations… deflector shields up!

[beltrams]

When this is all said and done we'll all be driving less and especially living closer to work, the way humans used to live, up until not all that long ago. We'll own less cars, the cars we will have will be electric with less range than gas/diesel cars, and maybe at least some of us we'll have fancy (meaning expensive) plug-in, hybrid cars that burn expensive liquid fuel for the times when we *do* have to travel far. The roads will be less crowded, especially intercity, and government will have some trouble repaving roads with very expensive, hot mix asphalt.

People will rediscover buses such as Cyr, Concord Coach Lines, and Greyhound too. (Later, if the government cannot keep the interstate highway surfaces decent, then there might be a trend back to passenger rail, but I'm not all sure that will happen, and if it does, it will take some years.)

People won't be living 50 miles from work anymore. The fact that some people do live that far right now is an artifact of a few decades of cheap energy and it will be corrected by economic force. This will also impact employers who will now have to source employees on a more local basis. Households that have or had one adult working in one town with the other adult working 30 or more miles away in another town will be all the more pressured to both find work in one town or the other and employees and employer alike will have to deal with this reality.

But, still, the world won't end.

Stuart Staniford today posted a decent explanation (with more excellent graphs) of just why gasoline prices are so high, despite something of an increase in US oil production and lowered US demand. The short answer, as mentioned up thread: It's exploding demand in the Developing World, coupled with a world oil industry wrestling with - and beginning to lose ground to - Peak Oil.

That Essential Air Service subsidy the US DOT is about to award to some carrier to cover Presque Isle, that's been in the news, will prove to be rather futile as well as no amount of subsidy is going to make airline service out of Northern Maine economically feasible when jet fuel is $6, 7, or whatever a gallon it shortly is about to be.

Houlton gas prices....currently $3.83, Irving, Shell, and Doc's Place @ I-95/Rt. 1.

[tcrackly]

You're describing factors that occur in a more ideal world. People don't choose to travel so far to work because they like it , it's because they have to--- for the wages. In a state with such wide area as Maine, where you may have to drive 3-5 miles to the nearest gas station or gallon of milk, one is forced into such choices out of necessity.

[beltrams]

Originally Posted by tcrackly

You're describing factors that occur in a more ideal world. People don't choose to travel so far to work because they like it , it's because they have to--- for the wages. In a state with such wide area as Maine, where you may have to drive 3-5 miles to the nearest gas station or gallon of milk, one is forced into such choices out of necessity.

Of course this is true.

My closest gas station and milk is......... about 5 miles, as you say.

But it's also true that when affording the fuel for those kinds of drives day in and day out becomes an impossibility, something will give, and it ain't gonna be the price of gasoline that is going to do the relenting.

One of the first things my Economics 101 prof said, years back when, "There's no such thing as 'need.' It's all 'want', to some degree or another."

70 or 80 years ago, people simply couldn't commute 30 miles each way by car as cars were simply too unreliable, roads were too shabby, tires went flat too often, and even widespread road snow plowing excepting the main roads hadn't yet come on the scene to allow a long drive to work every day, and the consumer and work economy set itself up for, and accommodated that reality.

Then enter cheap gas, better cars, and better roads and over time, it became possible to live such a long-mileage commuting life. No matter how seemingly expensive in time and money a long road commute was, it was still at least possible, at least compared to before the cheap gas, better roads, cars, tires, and so on. Over time, some people bit the bullet and took a job further away, rather than move, perhaps because of cheaper housing further out, and/or because a spouse already had more local employment, or whatever. As painful as it was, it wasn't as painful as before, thus, longer commutes appeared on the scene.

Long commutes are about to become less possible once again.

Try this mind experiment:

Suppose somehow somebody invented a cheap Star Trek-style Transporter with say, a 70,000 mile range (as plucked out of an old Roddenberry book I once had.) Imagine, rather than using the Transporter for movement between spacecraft, it was used to move people around the surface of the earth. People could work and live anywhere they wanted (ignoring political borders for the moment.) In time, we could work in -- I dunno -- NYC or Research Triangle Park, pulling great pay, and then beam home after work to some small town in South Dakota, or the Arkansas Ozarks, or the St. John Valley in Aroostook, where the scenery, weather, and home prices were more to our liking.) What would happen?

Well, wages and house prices would most likely do a major adjustment. Wages everywhere would greatly equalize. NYC wages would come down, since the pool of workers able to reach the City would greatly expand.(Indeed, if people from the rest of the world could beam into the US for a day's work, US wages nearly everywhere would CRASH!) At the same time, home prices would equalize some, at least as employment affected real estate prices. Prices in places like Aroostook could go UP, since employment wouldn't be a hindrance to living here, while Manhattan prices would come down. I would think that the expensive, somewhat close-in suburbs such as southwestern CT would especially crash because, hey, rather than having to pay up for "country" living close-in to the City, one could beam way out to the real thing, somewhere else. Imagine cheap Transporter technology existing for say, 60 or 80 years. Imagine how different the world would look. (For that matter, I suppose some employers would move around too, some ditching the high wage places of San Mateo or Burlington, MA for somewhere cheaper, since their highly skilled, high tech workers could follow the company just about anywhere.)

All this is kind of what cheap gas, easy cars, and relatively great roads have done, on a lesser scale, to the US landscape and civilization, over the past 70 to 100 years.

Now imagine, for some reason, that cheap, Star Trek Transporter technology starts going away, or at least becomes extraordinarily expensive for ordinary people, perhaps because some rare element that makes Transporters workable becomes too scarce. (Let's say we run out of dilithium crystals. )

Imagine all the people living on the far north Canadian Prairies, who "had" to live there because it's cheap, all of a sudden saying, "Hey, that can't be! I "have" to get to work in Miami this morning."

On a lesser scale, that's what we may about to have to endure, shortly, with the reality of Peak Oil. Combined with the fact that electric and hybrid cars, are somewhat more expensive and yet less capable range-wise, than the relatively cheap gasoline cars we've gotten used to (and more importantly, our regional economies have gotten used to and accommodated), we're going to go backwards some on the mobility scale. Doing so will mean that wages and house prices readjust again, somewhat. Some people will have to move. Some employers and jobs will have to move too and this will impact Maine in some ways, as will it impact New York City and everywhere else too.



I will say, that since my post several hours ago, I've done some reading on electric car developments and it does look like there are quite a few electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles hitting showrooms in the next few years and I suppose at least some folks will be able to afford them. They may go 15 to 50 miles on a charge, depending on whether they are fully electric or are a gas/electric hybrid. We don't all have to go Amish buggy shopping in Thorndike or Smyrna just yet.