The good people at FlowingData (I’m really getting hooked on that site) have put together a neato animated bar chart to show the ups and downs of gasoline prices across eight U.S. regions since April 1993. Back then, the price the pump was a mere $1.07 per gallon — or a piddling 28 cents per litre, for us metrically-inclined folk North of the border. That means my Civic could have done the six-hour drive from Montreal to Toronto on $11 and change. Today, the average U.S. price is $4.03 per gallon, or $1.06 per litre. Up here in Montreal, it’s more like $1.40, and my little road trip would cost me $56.
If you drive an Escalade you can’t afford and all these numbers are making you queasy, it probably serves you right — but you can still take heart in the knowledge that poor Turks shell out nearly twice what Canadians do, and two and a half times what Americans pay — a whopping $2.70 a litre, or $10.22 per gallon, higher than any country on Earth. And they manage. So let’s all just quit our collective whining about opportunistic oil companies and take the damn bus.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Jon Peltier // Aug 8, 2008 at 4:25 pm
I built a version that works in Excel:
Gas Prices - Animated Bar Chart for Excel
2 Asher Vijay // Aug 10, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Yeah! And let’s all lobby for city buses to be made by Zen cars! Do you know about Zen cars? They’re very nifty, but slow… I get the feeling you already know about all of this, but I just can’t remember!
3 mark // Aug 10, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Yup! : )
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