Since you seem to hop between the Bay Area and your natural environs, is it feasible to belong to Costco and get gas there?

My gas savings more than pay for my membership there, and I hardly ever buy anything in the store.

Meanwhile, India's Tata will begin selling its Nano in a few months. Priced at $2500, this car will be affordable for 40 million more people in that country than any car previously. Global demand for automotive fuel is not going down.

It's never gone above $3.99 here but I filled up for $2.30 this week with $1.70 in savings from the Giant Eagle. The cool thing about hardly ever driving is that by the time you do fill up, your discount is huge.

$4.21 here. I should fill up soon before it goes up again.

A friend of mine just ordered a stack of bumper stickers

THIS POS GETS MPG

where you fill in the number with a sharpie or whatever.

Lowest I've seen it around L.A. in the past few days is 4.39, when we were in Pasadena over the weekend -- about 20-30 cents cheaper than where we live in the Valley, which itself is about 20 cents cheaper than what we were seeing a few weeks ago.

I'm still irritated that there's no practical way for me to take public transportation to work, but given that I worked till 9:00 or 10:00 every night last week, that's probably for the best these days...

GF and I were talking the other day about how both of us (independently) used to really enjoy just taking off and driving somewhere, with no designated destination, as a cheap form of entertainment when there was nothing more pressing or interesting to do for the day.

It's very sad to me that those days are gone.

The lowest I've seen so far was $3.84 a gallon. Sad to say that that actually made me happy. I put $50.00 in my gas tank before driving to Pennsylvania this past weekend, and when I got back (and my car never moved from my aunts' house when we got there) I was back down to a quarter of a tank. Sigh.

used to really enjoy just taking off and driving somewhere, with no designated destination, as a cheap form of entertainment when there was nothing more pressing or interesting to do for the day.

Oh yes! I remember when I was in grad school in Iowa City, just taking off down county roads for one of the small towns within an hour or two, and just tooling around. I'd find an old cafe or bar and sit down at the counter and strike up conversations with locals, maybe wander around town looking into shop windows and sit at the old bandstand in the park and write in my journal. It was great fun, but it seems like a million years ago.

I paid $10 for my banged-up old Toyota Starlet. Back then (1994 or so) a tank of gas for it was $10, so every time I filled up the car, its value doubled.

Just got filled up today @ $4.37.9, 16 cents down from 16 days ago and 6 cents lower at Costco than the lowest ARCO (which is the largest spread since I moved here and joined Costco).

And, unrelated and irrelevent, except to one other MeChazen, I found the Malt-O-Meal Blueberry Muffin Tops Cereal (cold cereal in a big bag), and for M-O-M's first attempt to NOT copy a big name cereal, it is dangerously good.

Amateurs. Gas here is about $9 a gallon.

Amateurs. Gas here is about $9 a gallon.

So, clue us in. What do you do? I mean, you certainly don't drive anywhere do you? How do you get along? I can't imagine how that works unless everyone there makes a hell of a salary. Really, I'd like to know people get along with prices like that.

It's getting harder DarkForest. Luckily, we're on a tiny island, so there's no real need to drive that far.

DarkForest: I don't own a car, but if I did, I sure as hell couldn't afford to drive it very often. Folks use public transportation, or, I imagine, make decisions to do without other things in order to buy gas.

Folks use public transportation

Heh, no public transportation here. I suppose the solution is for everyone to move into a megacity and let the landlords eat us up.

I paid 3.99 a gallon the other day. My '94 honda still gets 40+ mpg. So 10 cents a mile. I actually worry more about how high energy prices will ripple through the economy to raise the price of everything else. I know people will be suffering with high heating oil prices this winter here in the northeastern U.S.

I suppose the solution is for everyone to move into a megacity and let the landlords eat us up.

Well, the solution is for urban planning focused on multiple "mini-city" centers, and convincing folks that they don't need 750 square feet of house or more per occupant.

But for right now I'd just settle for better public transportation in the cities and towns that we do have.

the solution is for urban planning

Hear, hear.

The gas price is down again. Does this mean the war is working?

urban planning

Sounds good, sort of, but my inner cynic says: haven't we already had a hundred years of "experts" doing the "planning" for "us"? Does real-world "urban planning" benefit anyone but the rich and the upper classes?

So, clue us in. What do you do?

In order of frequency of use: walk, public transport, car club, cab. We rent out our parking space for the equivalent of a month's rent on our flat each year - owning a car would be stupid crazy.

Does real-world "urban planning" benefit anyone but the rich and the upper classes?

Yes, unless you're doing it wrong.

I think you're missing the entire point of urban planning, DarkForest.

And no, we haven't had a hundred years of "experts" doing the "planning" for "us".

Yes, unless you're doing it wrong

Exactly my point.

KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF MY BATHWATER, YOU MONSTER!

Exactly my point.

Okay, fine, then the solution is GOOD urban planning.

The discipline of sustainable development in land use planning is very recent. As fuel prices continue to rise, you're going to see further development in this area.

And in regards to your comment about the upper class: one of the basic tenants of urban planning is to AVOID hugely varied real estate values that lead to outlying slums and ghettos.

My point is that special interests with money always get served first.

As fuel prices continue to rise

Have these planners been asleep at the switch? It's not like no one saw this coming.

discipline of sustainable development in land use planning is very recent

People are people. Greed and folly have not changed. Big Dig anyone?

So, clue us in. What do you do?

Darkforest, somehow we manage. As seanyboy says, it's not a large island. My case - we have a 2-person household, not huge earners but not poor either, with one old Toyota, owned outright, husband drives 24 miles a day to work and back, I work from home and the city we're in is smallish so if I want to go anywhere I walk. I use online shopping quite a lot. Public transport is good enough that I can get a train or bus to most places I'd want to go to outside my city. We chose the house because, among other reasons, it's near the centre of town. When I lived in London I didn't bother with a car, and a pass for public transport cost me about $150/month. We're about to get a new(ish) car as a gift from a generous relative.

In general, commutes are probably shorter here than in the US (as we'd expect, given the relative size of the countries). Most people would consider a 45-minute drive each way to be a long commute.

Petrol today is £1.17/litre (and that's down £0.03 from two weeks ago). 1 US gallon = 3.79 litres. 1.17*3.79=£4.43/gallon, which is almost exactly $9, as Specklet said.

Have these planners been asleep at the switch? It's not like no one saw this coming.

Well, it's silly to blame this on the planners themselves, who are usually at the whim of some corporation or another, who are at the whim of regulations and "what the people want." So yes, we've known for a long time that many American cities are way too spread out to be economically feasible in the near future, but there hasn't been any political will because no one's been seriously affected yet. I am not a civil engineer, but city planning is an armchair hobby of mine. "Walkable cities", "sustainable development," etc. have been seriously discussed and proposed since the 1970s, but again it's hard to develop any momentum when governments and consumers alike see the high price tag and don't feel any immediate pinch from the status quo. Well, that pinch is coming - it's not 30 or 40 years away like it was in the 70s.

discipline of sustainable development in land use planning is very recent

If by recent you mean last half decade, then sort of. It actually hearkens back to patterns of urban development that grew organically pre-automobile. Our current urban/suburban dichotomy developed as a response to the availability of cheap travel. As travel becomes expensive again, we are seeing a return to the older model, but it's been a painful one for many people. I think it's partly a governmental responsibility to make that transition less painful.

People are people. Greed and folly have not changed. Big Dig anyone?

I dig what you argument, but I don't get your point, exactly. We shouldn't trust governmental agencies to do anything at all?

alto, you remind me of all the years when I lived in small cities and could walk to work and and all my other local needs. I always preferred living that way. I lived that more years than not. But not at the moment, unfortunately. It'd be nice to get back to that kind of life, regardless of gas prices.

I guess I still don't get how energy prices that high don't drag your economies into the dump as I'm afraid may happen here in the US. Are your electric prices proportionately high? If not, why aren't you all driving electric cars? And if they are, how do you heat your homes? Perhaps in Europe, you have better safety nets for the poor.

And on urban planning, I'd agree that good urban planing could be very helpful in making cities more livable for everyone in a post-oil future. We'll just have to wait and see how well that works out here. No doubt they've managed things better elsewhere where gas prices have been high for a while.

We shouldn't trust governmental agencies to do anything at all?

I think it's pretty clear that government is both totally necessary, and totally compromised by the corrupting influence of power.

Trust them? Not without complete transparency, open books, etc. But I think we're straying a bit from the topic, whatever that was...

I can't speak for the whole of Europe, just (my bit of) the UK.

Not sure if electric and gas prices are proportionately high (what proportion are we talking about?) but they have certainly jumped by upwards of 40% in the past few months. We pay about $140/month to power a three-bedroom terrace (row house), and that's with plenty of energy-saving lightbulbs and a modern efficient boiler. There is a winter fuel payment for the elderly but other than that there is certainly concern about how those on lower incomes are going to cope with the rising cost of heating their homes in the winter. I'd guess though that there are better safety nets here than in the US.

The allegation at the moment, with respect to gas/electricity, is that the power companies do not do enough to get their poorest customers onto the cheapest tarifs (usually online tarifs). People who can't pay their bills are forced to have their houses fitted with meters, which works out more expensive per unit of fuel, which doesn't help anyone. Government can help by intervening with the energy companies to try to work out better ways of getting information to customers, and government claims it is doing so. Not sure if it's working.

GF and I were talking the other day about how both of us (independently) used to really enjoy just taking off and driving somewhere, with no designated destination, as a cheap form of entertainment when there was nothing more pressing or interesting to do for the day.

It's very sad to me that those days are gone.

I was thinking about this the other day - we used to do this a lot - get in the car and drive a couple of hours up into the mountains just for the drive, or up to the airport to watch people and planes come and go. Yet another simple form of entertainment gone.

It always amuses me to see Americans complain about fuel prices - unleaded is currently about the equivalent of AUD6.80 per gallon - not as high as the UK, but we have even greater distances between everything than (probably) most Americans, because our country has so much space in between all its bits where people are.

We are certainly seeing a change in urban planning here, with more and more apartment buildings going up in our cities and, in many cases (in Brisbane, at least), parking buildings being revamped into apartments. A lot of work is being done on the public transport network here, although it's a bit of too little, too late, because the corridors don't exist that would allow for efficient public networks. Meanwhile, billions continue to be spent on ways of getting cars in and out of the city instead of on large car parks in suburban train stations and more trains (or better suburban bus networks). In the early '70s, our state government tore up the railway line linking my city with the capital and then sold the land it was on! Now they have built a new rail corridor on land they paid many, many times more for.

Brisbane is a good example of a city evolving without much planning, dg - they didn't have any town planning until the 60s, and then had a backward-arse government for decades which is why they're having to do so much rectification work now. And the worst feature of the road network (and, relatedly, the public transport system) is its centralisation - everything goes through the CBD. But I lived there and got around quite happily for many years without a car (although I did make use of friends' cars for trips to waterholes and etc and got a lift from a colleague who lived nearby for one job, and living in Gumdale and having your bike stolen is one of the most suckful things ever).

Conversely, I grew up in a totally planned city (Canberra), now almost 100 years old. It's organised into districts with 'town centres' and smaller local centres, with large tracts of bush between, lots of bike paths and a decent public transport system. I remember riding alongside my mum, on her bike with my sister in a baby seat, and she would drop us at kindy and school then ride into our nearest town centre to catch a bus to the one in which she worked, and her total commute was still only 40 minutes. The city has grown phenomenally, though, and they've added more districts and mainly low-density housing and development priorities have changed, and the city has changed a lot as a result - although they still claim the highest proportion of commuters walking and cycling to work in Aus. (Mock if you will, I know a lot of people hate Canberra and think it's boring but it was an excellent place in which to grow up, and is a great example of a well-planned city).

GF and I were talking the other day about how both of us (independently) used to really enjoy just taking off and driving somewhere, with no designated destination, as a cheap form of entertainment when there was nothing more pressing or interesting to do for the day...

I was thinking about this the other day - we used to do this a lot

I did drive a lot for fun when I had a work car with full personal use (I got my licence at age 25 for the job). I drove 50,000km in my first year of driving, 60,000 the next - I covered a huge area for work but a chunk of those kays were just hooning around because I wasn't paying for any of it (driving Brisbane to Adelaide and back, doing a loop through the rainforest up Mt Nebo on my way home from work, etc). The environmental consequences didn't really enter my head when I had a free car, which is pretty terrible really.

Anyway, rambling, to summarise: Urban planning can be very beneficial when done well; I don't think Australia, the US and the UK/Europe are fair comparisons in these terms due to the differences in area, population density and age/establishment of the settlements; and having a car can be great fun but it's grand to live very comfortably without one, and it's easy to neglect the wide-ranging consequences of car use when using a car is cheap.

Yeah, Canberra appeals to my orderly mind a great deal and I love that bushland areas were planned in from the beginning. The weather, though ...

I also used to have a work car (I had two, actually - one for full personal-only use and one for commute use - we didn't own a car for five years or pay a single vehicle-related bill during that time), so it was an enormous shock to the system to have to start paying for fuel again. That's about when the "driving for fun" thing stopped, now that I think about it.