New Jersey

Here’s an ominous thought buried in a Star-Ledger story:

Inside, Empro Products makes the ubiquitous numeric signs found at gas stations. The phone rings quite a bit these days.

“In the last two weeks we’ve been getting hit hard for digit number 4,” said Vinnie Verma, Empro’s general manager. “We’ve also gotten a very limited number of calls for 5s.”

It has become a question of when, not if, gas prices hit $4 per gallon, and station operators want to be prepared.

The company supplies signs to most service stations in the mid-Atlantic and New England states.

(emphasis added)

I think $4/gallon is a given.  Yesterday I paid $3.859/gallon in a Hartford suburb, because I was running a little lower than I’d like (I topped off later for $3.799); while pumping my precious standard unleaded, I got to see the numbers “4.099″ staring at me from the premium unleaded side of the pump.

Mercifully, there wasn’t a diesel pump on that island at the gas station.

I know that gas is still comparatively cheap in the U.S., but $5/gallon is till not pleasant to think about, when some of my earliest memories are of $0.289/liter gas in one of the gas crises in the 70’s, followed later by $0.599/gallon after normalcy returned.

Friday morning, I had the disturbing experience of watching gas prices rise as I watched. As I went to fill up my tank in the morning, the three closest gas stations were selling regular unleaded for $3.539, $3.639, and $3.659 per gallon. However, while I was pumping at the $3.539 station, I got to see the price on the sign change…and sure enough, the next person at my pump would be paying $3.659/gallon. The evening before, I saw one station in West Hartford selling premium unleaded for $3.999.

Last weekend, the New York Times ran an article mentioning that New Jersey’s gas prices were then under $3/gallon, and attempting an explanation why:

In a nation where some states could see the price of gas eclipse $4 a gallon this summer, New Jersey’s prices are often among the lowest in the nation, according to AAA, the automobile club, a fact that might surprise many from outside this region. In New Jersey — far from the oil fields of Texas or Alaska but where people love their cars and motorists buy 11 million gallons of gas daily — many stations still sell unleaded gasoline for a price that begins with a 2, not a 3.

The prices are lower here for a variety of reasons, one being that many of the state’s 4,000 stations are independently owned and drive up competition, which drops prices. Another is that New Jersey is flush with refineries and gasoline infrastructure like fuel pipelines and deep harbors to import petroleum from around the world.

But probably the biggest reason is that New Jersey has the nation’s third-lowest gasoline tax, at 14.5 cents a gallon, and it hasn’t gone up in almost two decades.

I’m not sure that I’d put the tax rate as the “biggest reason” for the lower prices…but I do have to admit that it’s tough continuing to believe that maintaining gas tax rates to help incent conservation when considering how expensive gas is, and how many doctors appointments my wife has with doctors who are 30-50 miles away…..

Remember the days when New Jersey was almost as unattractive an auto insurance market as Massachusetts was?

My how times have changed…or so sayeth the Inquirer:

New Jersey has fixed its auto insurance problem.

Five years after the state deregulated the industry, the results are in, and by almost every measure the reform has been a resounding success.

Premiums are down. Competition is up. The number of insured is up. Complaints to the state are down by more than half. [...]

I wonder if there’s any way we can get that article syndicated and run in the Boston Globe….