Many Americans are cutting back on everyday expenses as gas prices soar due to President Donald Trump’s war in Iran, now approaching the 10-week mark. About 44 percent of Americans said they’re driving less due to high gas prices, while 42 percent said they’ve slashed household expenses, according to a Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll. In addition, the poll revealed that 34 percent have altered travel or vacation plans. Americans are changing their behaviors as national average gas prices hit $4.43 per gallon Saturday, according to the AAA motor club. This time last year, the national average was just $3.15 per gallon. Patrick de Haan, a petroleum analyst for GasBuddy, said Saturday’s average price marked a sobering new record. “The national average price of gasoline has never been higher on the second day in May than it is today,” he wrote on X.
I have been driving less because of the gas prices… But that’s because my wife keeps stealing my fake Mustang for her errands, since it is too expensive to drive her gas-guzzer Honda Civic.
Because of the inflation, the wife and I planned that we would do in state road trips for spring through fall because we really couldn’t afford anything more fancy but with a Miata I thought that would be a fun compromise. Gas prices shut that all down. I thought how can I go even cheaper than that ? Ok this year is patio cookout and staycation. Sure, look at the price of food! That brings us back to inflation. This year is the year of laying low and eating poor. Puzzles are still cheap… Sigh.
Cutting the motor vehicles out entirely is such an insanely massive savings.
Yes, but realistically most Americans do not live in a place where that is possible.
Doubt.
Well doubt all you want buy it’s true. That’s not hard information to learn if you put in the absolute minimum effort by the way.
If I could figure out how to do that I would. My daily commute is 1 hour 😭
In the same way that using degoogled Android usually requires you to get a different compatible phone, and loss of certain apps requires you to live your life a bit differently; the car-free lifestyle also take some pre-planning, and sometimes large changes in your life.
If you don’t think it’s worth it, that’s your choice. But car-centric lifestyles will get increasingly hard to sustain.
You are not actually trying to compare fiddle fucking with your phone for a few hours to be just as easy to just giving up a car. I Wana see you ride the bus with a weeks groceries for a family of 5.
There’s only so many remote jobs available, the entire service economy requires workers who often can’t afford to live near their jobs. So unless your “just restructure your entire life” plan includes a comprehensive guide to change the nation’s economy fuck off with that bootstrap shit.
My city is literally a shrine to a car. The city planners designed it like a wheel.
And huge chunks of them will still vote for whoever the GOP oozes out of the orphan crushing machine next.
but 40% think he’s doing a great job.
11% of the population isn’t allowed to join the military due to being … too dumb. They can still vote, though.
Remember, 100 IQ is the AVERAGE, half of people are under 100 IQ.
Maga: Ya but do the blacks have it worse?
hell you have to
So much winning
As I am forced back into the office because downtowns and business are lazy assholes and didn’t transition and figure out how to be better
You can’t make a civilization run on cheap gas forever.
Oh poor Americans…who chose him.
Stupid Maga Yanks
Oh poor Americans…who chose him.
Don’t forget the equal number of Americans who couldn’t be bothered to make a choice to reject him.
I mean both the ones who voted for him, and the ones who failed to vote at all too
I guess it takes gas hitting $5/gallon for people to start riding bikes around here. It’s also strange how empty the gas stations are today.
How do you ride a bike through the interstate?
Stay as much to the right as possible
Bike riding is not a viable alternative for many people with cars.
Yeah, frozen groceries aren’t going to make it home unspoiled if I bike down and up the significant hills between my place and Costco, and because of the way the buses work it’s also a 1-2h trip each way instead of a 10-15m drive so that’s not really viable either.
I also can’t see myself carrying the 2x4x10’s or slats for my fence replacement on the car.
Biking to work is somewhat more of an option, though the way back does need to deal with the aforementioned massive hill so in that case I’d rather go down by bike and up by bus.
The anti-car crowd would have you believe that delivery is a viable, economical solution for all your woes.
Lucky! Where I live, it’s too hot to ride a bike for 7 months out of the year, and public transport does not exist outside of the suburbs.
A round trip Uber/Lyft to work is $110, and I make $120/day after taxes/insurance/investments.
A round trip drive takes two gallons of gas, so even at $45/gallon it would still be cheaper to just drive.
If gas were $45/gallon I think it’d be cheaper to invest in clean energy and drive an electric car or, better yet, the city invests in trolly busses or trains.
you know, the price of oil directly impacts the price of electricity where i am. so assuming i could take on a payment equal or more to the cost of my electric bill to even purchase such a vehicle, i would also be sending my electric bill through the roof, plus increased insurance. i literally cannot afford this any better than higher gas, so i keep my fingers crossed that my 15 year old car lasts awhile yet.
capitalists have nickled and dimed a lot of us americans to the brink, there’s no more wiggle room.
(also, bussing to work is two hours one way, i checked. the eight mile trip by bike would be longer i’m sure, but we’re approaching the time of year where heat kills people. literally.)
Not cutting out driving?
I had to deal with an office in the US recently. Still meeting together, still taking trips for “team building”. All while complaining about the high cost of fuel to travel. The remote work for the most part, but the higher up you go in their corporate ladder, the more travel and luxury they afford themselves. And then ask all their lowest workers to join in too, on their own dime.
Morons the lot of them.
We can’t cut out driving. American society is built around cars.
The problem is that not enough people are doing anything to try and fix that society.
This is such a bullshit excuse, because while it’s true, there is no reason why Americans haven’t regulated cars to be more energy efficient, and why they haven’t built better public transport since the 70’s.
On average European cars have about 30% better mileage than American cars, and almost all energy saving technologies were invented and implemented in either Japan or Europe.USA is a shitty country, first because they DEMAND these shitty huge cars with poor safety records, second because they DEMAND they are cheap to use, with no regard for climate change.
Americans drive more, and they drive less fuel economic than other places in the world with better regulation.
The net result is the average American pollute 2-3 times more than average for developed countries.USA is a country of selfish psychopaths (on average), that refuse to take responsibility for their actions.
there is no reason why Americans haven’t regulated…
There’s no good reason, but there’s definitely reasons. Corporate protectionism for one, so our car manufacturers aren’t forced to actually compete with foreign companies.
We can’t even figure out how to regulate lights that don’t blind you.
I’m not going to refute your overall assessment of Americans writ large (because I in large part agree.) I too wish we had better public transmit option. But what you’re saying ignores 1) the vast increase in distances the American needs to travel, and 2) the average American car isn’t less efficient, it’s (to your point) much larger. The lower efficiency comes from the size, not technology.
Maybe I’m biased because I’m in California (and not the shittier parts of the US), but I see California as every bit as responsible for automobile emission and safety laws as Europe or East Asia.
Is the average American selfish? Undoubtedly. Did Europe/Japan invest in public transmit when America didn’t? Also without a doubt. But I also think it’s not quite so easy to paint with that brush if you take into account what makes America different than Europe/Japan.
the vast increase in distances the American needs to travel,
That should motivate to drive more gas efficient cars not less.
the average American car isn’t less efficient
It is less efficient in that they use more gas, weight and aerodynamics are part of that equation. many American cars have piss poor aerodynamics, and they are heavier for the same size of car, in part because of bigger motors and a cheaper frame based construction. The engines are also typically way less efficient, using big V8 engines with poor efficiency, that you would simply never see in Europe. The widespread use of giant cars like the Ford F-150 is insane. It’s almost like people in Nebraska buy them because they “need” to be able to carry a surf board to the beach 2000 km away. So yes American cars are way less efficient on average.
Maybe I’m biased because I’m in California
IDK maybe you are, California is AFAIK leading USA regarding emissions, when California set a standard, the auto makers follow it, and by proxy the rest of USA get cars that follow the Californian standard.
Problem has been for decades that where efficient 4 cylinder engines have been standard in Europe, USA has used wildly inefficient V8 engines. So no the Americans have not been using the same technologies nearly as much. For instance when we got 4 valves per cylinder in Europe, Ford was way behind, and advertised what they called lean burn. A way inferior technology, that both yielded fewer HP for the same size engine, and had lower gas efficiency.In Europe developments have been very much on the weight too, like the VW Polo 3l that could drive 100 km on 3 liter of gas, or 62,18 miles 0,79 gallon or 78 miles per gallon.
Part of achieving that was to use magnesium for the rims, and an extremely efficient 3 cylinder engine. This car was very popular here in Denmark, despite it was very expensive for the driving experience. But here most people are actively engaged in lowering the environmental footprint, while even in California such a car is probably unsalable.As an example we don’t currently feel the oil crisis at all, because our household has zero dependency on oil, we use wood pellets for heating (Denmark is a relatively cold country), we have solar panels that cover 80% of our electricity needs throughout the year, and we drive an electric car we can charge from the panels.
Denmark as a country has 82% as a whole, so what we buy from the grid has similar efficiency, reducing our dependency on non renewable energy to only 4% for our household.80+% of new cars sold in Denmark are electric.
I know Denmark is among the leaders in EV in Europe, just like California is for USA. But I expect you can see the difference between a European leading nation and a leading state in USA.
I know many Americans try to be more green, but the disinformation allowed in marketing makes it harder, and the lack of actually green production makes it near impossible.
In Europe we have way better democracies, and many European countries have parties to represent them that have a green agenda. An American voter mostly doesn’t even have the option to vote green.Sorry for the rant, but as you maybe can see, USA is mostly dysfunctional in this area, and failed to learn the lesson of the oil crisis in the 70’s, while most of the rest of the world did. Which is extremely unfortunate, since USA has all the natural conditions that exist around the world to develop and implement renewable energies, and USA had the biggest research and development capacity for many decades. So USA idling along on a free pass has been very damaging to the global development too.
I totally agree, 360M children
USA is a country of selfish psychopaths
and Trump is the #1 american
You painting the entire population as the same makes you the child.
Getting defensive and huffy about it doesn’t help. Americans as a whole are responsible for the how the rest of the world views them.
“Chinese as a whole are responsible for all the stereotypes against them.”
See how crazy that sounds? Fuck off.
Absolutely, Trump is not the problem, he is a symptom of American selfishness and disregard towards others, also called psychopathy.
This problem is not just in waging war against peaceful countries, bombing girl schools, and help Israel committing genocide, and extorting allies. This is also internally, removing healthcare while giving very expensive tax cuts to the rich. America first is nothing but a rewording of ME FIRST, like small children that haven’t learned empathy yet.
I yearn for public transportation. Best I can do is drive 7 miles to a park and ride, and then ride a bus for 4 miles to work. Not exactly an alternative.
Me too! I try almost every day to choose [what little available] public transpiration options. But in nearly every case, it’s going to take twice as long as driving, and cost more than twice what my electric car costs to operate. And that’s not even factoring in the final mile problem, which is often a deal breaker unto itself.
I live in a medium California city with some public transit, but it’s still car/suburb centric.
Sure they can. But they won’t.
I have seen the data: they tend not to group going to work with other errands, they tend not to car pool or even try other forms of commuting.
In fairness, many companies forced workers to go back to offices so there is a lot of bullshit from money keeping them this way, which stops people from setting up social events locally or having the time (or energy) to do shopping after work.
Most people drive a couple of times a day (!) trips less than 6 miles long, and of those errands, shopping, kids and church are 76% of all miles traveled.
Also, there is no reason not to change, lots of US cities and groups are trying to redefine what cities and suburbs look like. But will the populace change?
How many of those trips in a car are to the gym?
How many of those trips in a car are to the gym?
None, I can’t afford the gym in this economy.
Shows you how absolutely broke most Americans are they can’t absorb an extra $50 or so per month.
If it gets the MAGAts to care, keep jacking the price up!
As someone who needs doordash to pay my bills, no thank you
You know I didn’t think too much about the daily expense of gas since we drive relatively fuel efficient cars, but I looked up the mpg for some of the trucks and stuff near me and… How the fuck do people commute with mpgs as low as 12, sometimes?
Like, you shouldn’t commute over an hour anyway, but at 60 miles one way, some cars burn 5 fucking gallons. This has gotta be wrecking his truck driving supporters.
I live in central TN. I’m a Miata guy and the cost is hurting my wallet but almost every other vehicle is a monster lifted truck with oversized tires etc. I have no idea how those guys with truck payments can afford gas.
You can really stretch the monthly payments with 7 year loans, nevermind that in the long term you overpay by a hideous margin.
I’m pretty sure Biden did the fuel prices, that’s what the sticker on the pump said at least.
-His truck driving supporters, probably.
I’m a gearhead so my vehicles aren’t all efficient, and I just see higher fuel prices as the cost of my hobby going up, which isn’t good, but being a gearhead was already expensive. I’m sure these guys in oversized trucks feel feel similar.
That said, I also like cycling, have an electric skateboard, and use public transit when it makes sense, and I work from home, so the fuel prices don’t really affect me as much as some. Now, if I had a 120 mile round-trip commute I’d
kmsget an EV or plugin hybrid or ride my motorcycle, only driving my fun cars on occasion.A couple of years ago I got to see a guy shoehorn his person Ford F650 into a Starbucks parking lot. He was so proud of his massive waste of resources that he used daily for commuting and errands. It was utterly sickening with ow much he was excited to talk about how much he was wasting to “stick it to those horrible environmentalists”.
The Ford F650 is generally reported to get about 6.75 mpg. Gas prices up? Fuck that asshole. He deserves it.
In my red hat area, guys buy big fancy gas hog trucks mostly for show and to haul beer and dog food. They would never dream of hauling firewood in them - they have trailers for that.
I’ve seen people drive their daily commute with empty trailers still attached because they’re too lazy to unhitch them. Then when they do unhitch them they always leave the hitch still attached.
Psychopath society.
jesus put that oil in the ground for us to burn.
Well, the climate activists and net-zero army should be really excited now that gas prices are getting higher. No one would be able to afford it and we would get the zero-emissions goals they truly crave.
Gas will have to be high for a long time to make a difference with EVs here, especially with the huge level of protectionism. Since legacy automakers pretty much gave up on EVs and most new technology companies are blocked, pretty much all we have are Tesla and Hyundai/Kia. Hopefully Rivian can make it over the humo of mass production but you can’t really call them more than a niche so far
It’s nice to have options but Rivian trucks are still gigantic. I want an electric pickup the same size as one of those little Nissans in the 80.
It’s actually making a serious (at least short term) shift on EV sales in Germany. They’re spiking hard right now.
Germany also legalized balcony based solar panels for grid connections. People are excited about lower energy bills, and even directly charging their own cars from their own solar panels.
All of the data shows that renewables are winning the economics in the market compared to carbon-based options. We just need to keep pushing so the rich people let us move faster.
he could walk up and pop all their tires and they would still blame Joe Biden and vote for trump again.
The fuck. My dinkie little 25 year old Tacoma can go for about 230 miles on a full tank, that’s with it struggling up hill. Why would you want one of these trucks unless you wanted just the body to do an engine swap and fully customize but still.
Somehow it’s Obama’s fault.
they probably just blame biden to make themselves feel better about their decisions
Last time I had to drive a somewhat far away job for me. It was 30 miles. I had a not worse but not best mpg vehicle and had to fill up every week. I think that is fairly typical. trucks like that Im not sure you could get away with only twice a week. I mean maybe because I think the tanks are bigger but man then each fillup must be huge.
