Webb Family Blog

Today I filled up both my car and my truck with fuel. While I was filling up my car, I was listening to the Bruce Maiman talk show on KFBK 1530 AM. My car requires premium 91 octane fuel. At Costco, this was $4.159/gallon. My car took about 15 gallons. Next, I took my truck to an ARCO station. My truck also took about 15 gallons at $4.999/gallon for diesel. The reason I brought up the Bruce Maiman show was he was talking about the price of fuel and people’s driving habits. It just got me thinking about the state of things. Some of the comments on the show were doom & gloom prophecies about the finanical state of affairs in the future. Comments were made that costs of fuel will make it difficult for the middle-class to afford to drive and make it impossible for the poor to own a vehicle altogether. This statement seemed to sound plausible when I was filling up my truck… I was approached by a man who was driving an early 1980′s full-size Chevy conversion van. He said his van was out of fuel and he had no money to get his van home. I’m not sure exactly how poor his mileage was, but I’d imagine it to not be much better than 12 MPG, if that. He showed me that someone had given him three dollars, but that wasn’t even enough for him to get home. He was looking for someone to give him a gallon or so of fuel as they were filling up. I said he was trying to sell it and hopefully get something smaller that he could hopefully afford to drive for a little while longer. I was ultimately no help to his plight… I had no cash on me and I was filling up with diesel, which I’m guessing would not make his van run very well.

While I’m happy I have my truck, the cost of fuel has me not wanting to drive it any more than I have to. As prices are going up all over, I’ll be paying much more attention to the prices of fuel around. I have found a useful tool for keeping track of fuel prices. It is called GasBuddy.com. It is a site where individuals report the prices of fuel at stations anywhere, listing prices for all the types of fuel. Searches can find the cheapest or nearest stations. I’ve been to the site in the past, but initially they only reported the price of regular, which is not as beneficial to me as two of our three vehicles run on fuel other than regular (Kellie’s car thankfully runs fine on regular.) I also found that I can add a feature to my blog listing the average price of regular in the greater Sacramento region and comparing that over time and to the national average. I have created a tab at the top if the blog (between “About” and “Subscribe”) as well as being listed below.