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More Mathematical GasOctober 09, 2005 Some guy -- I think it's a guy -- is spitting bullets about the price of gas on Martha's Vineyard. He wrote a letter to the editor of the Martha's Vineyard Times in which he calculates how much we're being gouged, urges us to buy gas at the least expensive station (where I already go), and provides several phone numbers and websites where we can complain to the gummint. I really have been here too long. All the best outrages have come around several times; the names under the letters change, but nothing else does. During the last gas-gouging hoop-de-doo, the Times published each station's price per gallon every week. The difference between the highest and the lowest was probably 5 cents; the highest was maybe $1.60. Based on an average fill-er-up of 14 gallons, I figured I could save a big 70 cents by pulling in at the cheapest station instead of the most expensive. How far would I drive to save 70 cents? Not very. A box under the irate letter informs me that the average price per gallon statewide is $2.847; the island average is $3.477. In other words, we'd be paying 63 cents less per gallon if we didn't live here. Can't remember what it costs to take a car off-island round-trip these days (has it really been nearly four years since I took my truck off??); when the fares go down this coming Wednesday, it'll be around $40. You'd have to have a pretty big tank and lots of time on your hands to make the trip worthwhile. Since I have a little calculator on my desk, I start calculating. I gas up every two weeks, getting about 14.5 gallons per fill. I could save a little over $9 per tank if local gas prices were the same as the state average. This would save me about $234 a year. I flip to the real estate ads. (Some people listen to Rush Limbaugh or watch reality TV: I raise my blood pressure and exercise my bile with the real estate classifieds in the Martha's Vineyard Times.) The bottom end price for a house in the local market is about $500,000. If I saved $234 a year for 2,137 years, I could buy a house on Martha's Vineyard at 2005 prices. With my income maybe I could finance $90,000 of the total. In that case it would only take me 1,752 years, give or take a couple months, to save a down payment. What if Vineyarders stopped blowing all their gaskets about mopeds, gas prices, traffic at Five Corners, and who's rooking whom at the Steamship Authority? Maybe we'd actually get it together for something more important, like housing?
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