Good Year For The Outlaw

Let me first state I think Phil Luciano is a great columnist, and I am always entertained by his writing style, and “get it” when it comes to Phil’s sense of humor. He’s damn good at what he does in the paper.  But I take, shall we say, significant umbrage at yesterday’s baloney-filled column about speeding v. fuel economy.

Phil bought too far into the claims of his unnamed veteran cop “source” for this story.

This officer claims he’s surprised…I’m sorry, he said “flabbergasted”…that people are “still driving like maniacs” with fuel nearing $4.00 per gallon.

Excuse me, buddy, but I do NOT “drive like a maniac”, and just because one speeds he/she is not a “maniac”. So let’s cut the hyperbole here. To me, the “maniacs” are the a-holes who run stop signs, don’t use signals, change lanes without warning, accelerate through left-turn lane yellow- and red-lights, and follow other cars too damn close. THOSE are the “maniacs”, and those people don’t have to “speed” to be an idiot.

Beyond that, though, let’s examine the claims in the story and the math around them:

According to AAA Motor Club, Phil says, decreasing speed from 75 to 65 MPH increases fuel economy by 10%, and decreasing speed from 70 to 55 MPH increases fuel economy by 17%. First, simple math tells us that even if these claims are true (they’re not), they don’t make a lot of sense. A decrease from 75 to 65 MPH is a decrease of 14% (and an increase in time needed to arrive at the destination by that same 14%). Ever heard the phrase “time is money”? Well, in sales, it’s true. So to effectively increase my mileage by 10%, I’ve got to slow down 14% and waste more time driving. Not a good deal.

And the other example given is just as bad…to get a 17% claimed (again, not true) increase in mileage, I’ve got to slow down by 22%! In other words, my 100-minute drives back and forth to Canton everyday become 122 minutes, and I spend another one hour and forty minutes in just one week (that’s a LOT of time I could be working at my desk or making sales calls) driving my car back and forth, only to see my mileage (supposedly) increase.

But alas, it doesn’t work that way in all vehicles. Hell, it doesn’t work that way in any vehicles that I know of. Cars, like golf clubs, baseball bats, and numerous other man-made items, have a “sweet spot”. Each one is different. Some vehicles (mine, for instance) achieve peak gas mileage at higher speeds, because of the gearing and how it matches to the “sweet spot” for engine RPM.

After reading it yesterday, I did a little test this morning. I topped off my tank and headed up to I-80, where I zeroed out my trip computer and set the cruise at 70. My drive from Annawan to Ottawa netted 24.8 MPG according to GM’s uncannily accurate dashboard trip-computer that I’m happy my Grand Prix came with. On the way back, I topped off, zeroed out the CPU and set the cruise at 55. Yes, on I-80. No rush to get back. Same trip, same miles. According to Phil and the AAA Motor Club, I should have seen my mileage increase to 27.3 MPG. Um, no. Try 24.2 MPG. Yep, my car gets worse mileage at 55 than it does at 70 in the same conditions. (Okay, it was four degrees warmer, for you engineer types).

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I remember a time a decade or two ago where “convenience stores” were willing to mark their gas prices as low as they could to still make a minimal profit (2 or 3 cents per gallon was all my grandfather profited towards the end of his run as a store owner in the early 80’s), and then rely on the customers to come inside and spend a bunch on pop, hot dogs, potato chips, candy, cigarettes, etc. in order to turn a healthy profit. Believe me, when you charge 99 cents for a 32oz pop from the fountain, you’re making a nice profit, and when you buy 8 hot dogs for $2 dollars and 8 buns for $0.60 and then sell those same 8 dogs for a total of $12 dollars, you’re doing alright.

But that has changed. Gas must be as profitable as humanly possible for these stores. They’ve got to make a killing on every gallon, just like they do on every hot dog inside. Why? Because we can pay at the pump. We can stick a credit/debit card into a slot, start the pump, fill the car, return the nozzle, grab the receipt, and hit the road. The convenience store/filling station has just lost a big potential profit be me not coming into their store. So they’ve gotta get it where they can, and gas prices suffer even more because of it.

I’d like to see a station go back the other way. Take away the pay-at-the-pump option and drive traffic back into their store, where, while preparing to pay, I (and most others) will grab a cup of pop, a pack of gum, a candy bar, a bag of chips…whatever…and the shopkeeper will now show a profit again.  Think about it when you whip out your credit card to “pay at the pump”. Your interest in saving a walk of 40 feet and possibly having to stand in line behind…heaven forbid…one or maybe even two people, is now helping me - and YOU - pay more for your gas.

I was stunned with delight this week when CNN asked the question, “Which candidate’s plan regarding removing the gas tax for the summer months is the best?” 

Of course, John McCain has pandered to his base by suggesting a simple removal of the Federal Gas Tax for the summer. Hillary Clinton’s idea (which, if I’m not mistaken, is pretty darn similar to a plan talked about by a certain local candidate a few weeks back) called for a dropping of the gas tax and a “windfall profit tax” being assessed the oil companies in addition, which, of course, was a populist position pandering to her base. Obama? Called both ideas irrational and, basically, stupid, saying the tax is not the problem, that corporate greed is.

The results:

McCain - 2%

Clinton - 13%

Obama - 85%

Unbelievable. We do have hope in this country. In a day and age were a certain percentage of the population thinks that any tax is wrong, in a day and age in which it’s an absolute rarity to see 60% or more of us take the same side on anything, to have 85% of the respondents see through the shameful ruse offered by McCain or Clinton is a good sign. Of course, it would have been a better sign if the poll was on Faux News and their typical viewers had similar results, but I’ll still take it.

BTW, if the idiotic populist pandering ideas of McCain and Clinton were actually put in place, and we say 18 cents knocked off a gallon of gas (wow…big deal…it’s only $3.49 now!) we’d simply see the oil companies put 10-15 cents back into the price for additional pure profit. That’s what they did the last time this stupid plan was tried…who can honestly sit here and say they wouldn’t do it again?

Friday, 9pm, March 7th. Gas in Kewanee and Peoria: $3.29 per gallon. A Shell station in Pekin is at $3.30. See the high (and low, for that matter) prices here.

I just got gas in the Quad Cities. It was $2.99. Yet 35 miles away in Kewanee it’s $3.29. In Bloomington right now, it’s $3.07, but Peoria is $0.22 higher just 40 miles away. Amazing. But some don’t seem to have a problem with it. And the oil magnates? They’re rolling in dough even at the lowest prices. Imagine the profit the Peoria operators are seeing.

Sickening. Disgusting. And we’re at least 10 months from any relief. January, 2009 can’t come soon enough.

Gas was $2.95 per gallon at noon yesterday (87 octane unleaded, in Canton). It was $3.19 five hours later.

What the hell?!?!?!

A 25 cent per gallon increase…what is the given excuse this time? The explosion at a refinery? A refinery that, btw, produces 70,000 barrels per day?

70,000 barrels per day. How big is that? Well, a look at the list of “largest refineries” shows 22 refineries world wide with over production capacities of over 300,000 per day.  As a matter of fact, that same list shows this refinery that suffered the explosion wasn’t even among the Top 20 in TEXAS ALONE!!!

So let me get this straight: one of the smallest refineries in Texas has an explosion and our gas goes up 9% in one day?

Nah, they’re not greedy.

UPDATE: Just got back from Iowa, on Friday, the 22nd, at 10pm. Gas in Iowa? $2.89 per gallon on Interstate 80. Oh, did I mention, that Illinois’ tax-per gallon rate is actually LOWER than Iowa’s?

We’re getting ripped off here, fellow Illinoisans. Period.

I am still a tad miffed about the whole “booming economy” discussion a couple of weeks back on Billy’s Blog, on a post originally written by Anon E. Mouse.

While visiting Iowa and my kid this weekend, I grabbed a couple of local papers (Waterloo Courier/Dubuque Telegraph-Herald) while traveling. Saturday’s Courier reported that Iowa’s poverty level is up 30%…30%…from 2000 to 2005. The state’s middle class is shrinking, too, and while wages were up 7.8% in the first half of the decade, that doesn’t come close to the 13% rate of inflation, thus the increase in poverty. The state says median income needed to increase about $4,000 more per family than it did to keep up with inflation. Wow. Booming, eh?

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Here in Kewanee, we’ve just lost our “Murphy USA” gas station, located, like all Murphy stores, on Wal Mart property. At first, I thought it may have been a failure for Wal Mart, which would bring great joy to most of the world. But it turns out that Murphy, starting in May, has begun purchasing the land from Wal Mart for each of their stations, after having previously just leased space from the Uber-Giant-Evil-Empire Corporation. With that announcement came the corresponding notice that 47 Murphy USA stores would be closing. Kewanee turned out to be one of them.

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Billy, Billy, Billy - are you trying to say you educated me?  First of all, if you think for one second the price will go down when they open up new oil fields, your world is more Pollyannaish than mine!

And since my car has an onboard computer to tell me my gas mileage, along with me double checking it every time I fill up, I can say factually that my mileage is 24.6 MPG when I average exactly the speed limit, and 24.6 when I average 70. I’ve done this on a cross country trip, with cruise control, 400 miles on a tank, fill up, check it, 400 more miles, fill up, check it again. WIND CONDITIONS and ELEVATION CHANGES affect my mileage more than my driving speed.

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Between seeing “$3.12″ per gallon of unleaded and seeing heating bills this past winter, it’s obvious that “gas” of any kind is not cheap anymore. This, of course, despite record profits for the greedy friends-of-Bush in the oil industry.

So one of my employees had an idea this morning…from now on, every time he’s in a public place, when he feels flatulence coming on, he’s going to let it go…and then walk around the place and collect money for it. He figures if people are willing to pay $3.12 a gallon without complaint, and fork over hundreds of dollars every month to Ameren without complaint, they won’t mind paying two bits or so for his gas, and they should do it without complaint.