Some ideas to reduce the high cost of gasoline

Shock!

I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to feel “shocked” every time I go to fill up my car with gas. I’ve seen regular gas prices per gallon here in the Los Angeles area as high as $2.69 9/10 lately. And it seems like just a few weeks ago, they were around $2.25 9/10. Mathematically speaking, that’s a 19.5% increase in a matter of weeks.

What’s really insidious is that a significant increase in gasoline prices has a tremendous ripple effect throughout the economy. Increases the cost of doing business. When those costs are high enough, they are passed on to you and me in the form of higher prices. So this is not just about improving the environment, this is about economic survival!

We all need to take positive action

I think we drive prices down if we take collective action to reduce gas consumption. If we can reduce our domestic demand for gasoline, this should certainly eventually lead to stabilizing and possibly lowering the price we pay at the pump. And that will help stabilize prices throughout the economy. One of the great side benefits of this is that reducing our gas consumption will also improve the environment, especially air quality.

Some suggestions

Here are some suggestions. Some are things you can do to immediately lower your gas usage/cost. Some require cooperation with others. The cumulative effect of all these changes can be significant if everyone saves even a little bit:

1) Make sure you carpool at least once or twice a week. Every carpooler is one less person on the road.

2) Reach an agreement with your employer to change your work hours to times when the traffic is better. For example, if you arrive at work a couple of hours in the morning and leave a couple of hours early, you may be on the road when traffic is lighter. That should translate into higher gas mileage.

3) Reach an agreement with your employer to work 10 hours a day 4 days a week. Employers still get the same number of work hours, but this reduces the number of days you have to come to work. Days off may vary by employee so that it does not disrupt business operations.

4) Employers should consider allowing some employees to work remotely. With high-speed Internet connections and VPN accounts, this is now more technically possible than ever. As long as the employee is self-motivated, this benefits both the employer and the employee. Many times, employees who telecommute actually work longer on the days they telecommute due to reduced travel time. In addition, they usually eat at home during the working day, reducing lunch times. And there are fewer interruptions so they can focus and be more productive. And the employee has less stress reducing sick time and increasing morale.

5) Change one of your work days to Saturday or Sunday. In most cases, traffic is lighter on the weekends, so you should get better gas mileage. And isn’t it great to have a day off during the week to take care of personal things that are sometimes hard to do on the weekends.

6) Consolidate your trips. While reducing miles per gallon is important, the real savings come when you simply don’t use the car.

7) Set a personal goal to reduce your personal gas usage by 10%. I recommend that you write this goal on a card and tape it to the visor of your car so that you see it regularly. If you set a goal and review it frequently, you are more likely to take conscious steps to achieve it. Too often, we just jump in the car and drive away without thinking about the consequences.

8) Get a log book and start recording your gas usage every time you go to fill up. Write down the mileage, the number of gallons, the price per gallon, the total cost and your average miles per gallon. Then review the total figures at the end of each month. Once you get into the habit of writing down the information, it won’t take long. Simply recording this information will let you know how much or how little your car is being used. This will make it easier for you to take steps to reduce your consumption.

9) Next time you change your oil, ask for synthetic oil. Yes, synthetic oil is more expensive. But, when I switched to synthetic oil a few years ago, my mileage improved by 25%. That was in a different car than the one I drive now. I don’t know if it will experience any change, but I bet it will receive some improvement.

10) Take your car to a mechanic to find out what steps you can take to improve gas mileage. Maybe it’s as simple as tuning. Or a new air filter. Or air in your tires. Maybe using a fuel additive. The point is that if everyone takes action to improve their mileage, it could have a huge collective impact.

11) Reward the gas stations with the best prices with your business. It’s not that hard to find lower gas prices relative to other stations. If you have a warehouse club like Costco in your area, they usually have great prices. I estimate I save at least $0.15 per gallon buying gas at my local Costco.

12) Shop online for the lowest gas prices in your area. There are a few websites that post local gas prices across the country. If your area is covered, this can be a quick way to find the best prices. One such site is called http://www.gasbuddy.com. What is really amazing is how the price can vary by up to 20% in just a few blocks.

13) Reduce your speed on the freeway. Did you know that most cars get their best gas mileage between 40 and 60 miles per hour? Those people flying down the freeway at 70-80 miles per hour are unnecessarily consuming more gas and putting people’s lives at risk. I used to be in favor of raising the legal speed limit to 65 miles per hour or more. But knowing the savings we can all make if we just lower the average speed limit, I think it’s time we went back to 55 miles per hour. I know this will probably be a very unpopular suggestion, but I think it’s important to do it anyway.

14) Do not leave your car running to warm up or for any other reason. Most cars today heat up quickly, so there’s probably no reason to waste gas this way anymore.

15) When starting from a traffic light or stop sign, accelerate gradually. When you accelerate suddenly, you consume more gasoline.

16) Government officials should review the increase in daylight saving time. Studies have shown that overall energy drops when daylight saving time begins. This is probably because less energy is used at night, as we have an extra hour of daylight. What would happen if we moved the clocks forward half an hour or an hour more? I’ve noticed that when I wake up in the morning, it starts to get light around 6:30 here in Los Angeles. I imagine there would be little negative benefit if we turned our clocks forward and an extra half hour or hour to make the most of daylight. I think this would only work if it was carried out across the country. We should also be looking to move the clocks forward to early March instead of waiting until April. If you think this is unreasonable, remember that DST used to start in late April until the US Congress changed it by law.

17) Large corporations should consider establishing small satellite workplaces closer to where people live. Even having small offices in different places where people can go and connect their laptop to a high-speed Internet connection can make it easier for some knowledge workers to reduce travel distances. The government should offer tax incentives to encourage this.

18) Write to your local, state, and national leaders and encourage them to show true conservation leadership. It’s very easy to email leaders, I suggest you email them with these and/or your own suggestions. I am amazed that prices can rise so dramatically with so little notice from our public and private leaders. We need to let them know that we expect them to show a higher standard of leadership. A large number of these suggestions involve a significant change in the way we live and work. Many of these changes will not happen unless they are suggested and publicized by leaders at the national level.

It’s time to change our habits, it’s probably past time

These changes will only change if there is a change in our national mentality, our national dress. We have been conditioned to believe that we have to work the hours we work. We have been conditioned to believe that the only effective way to work is to travel to a central location. That we have to be physically at the Corporate location to be productive.

Government leaders should offer tax incentives to companies to implement policies that encourage conservation and reduce travel distances and times. They already do to some extent with carpooling, but that’s not enough. We just have to be more creative in finding ways to be more efficient and reduce gas consumption. Cut demand and prices are likely to follow.

There are other suggestions you could make, such as using public transportation or buying a car that uses less fuel. Those should be searched for, but those are the standard answers and longer term solutions. We certainly need to move in that direction in the long term, but given the recent dramatic increase in gasoline prices, of necessity, we need to take immediate action that will lead to lower prices in the short term, while moving toward long-term solutions. .

I know that some of these suggestions are radical. I know that many require the consent of people in authority over us, mostly our employers. And some require a certain amount of self-sacrifice (but not that much really if you change a few simple habits). The good news is that given the high cost of gasoline, if you take even a few of these actions, you can significantly lower your monthly expenses. And the truth is that if we want gasoline prices to go down, we each have to do our part.

If we all do a little, together we can achieve a lot!

Please share this article with as many people as possible. The more people believe that we can take meaningful steps to reduce gasoline consumption, the greater the chance that prices will go down. Wouldn’t it be great if our collective actions lowered gas prices to $1.20 a gallon! Those days are gone forever, if we believe they are gone. How would lower fuel prices improve your economy? How would this improve our national economy?