It’s not enough to make drivers spontaneously dance or break out in cheers at service stations, but they’re noticing something they haven’t seen for months.
Gas prices are going down appreciably, below $3 for the first time since April.
“It’s still outrageous, but it seems better,” said Cody Hulbert, who lives near Mill Creek.
As of Thursday, the average price for a gallon of regular unleaded fuel in the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett area was $2.98, according to AAA. The statewide average was just above $3.
That’s still more than 20 cents above the average at this time last year, but it’s well below where prices have hovered for most of the past three months. It’s 25 cents below the all-time peak reached during Memorial Day weekend.
With any luck, fuel prices have begun their normal slide into fall and winter, when less driving nationwide eases demand.
“What we’re seeing is good news for motorists as they look ahead to trips for Thanksgiving and Christmas,” said Janet Ray, spokeswoman at AAA’s Bellevue office. “I think maybe we’ve seen the highest prices for this year.”
Guessing how low they will go is dicey. Ray mentioned that some analysts think fuel prices will bottom out below $2.50 a gallon this winter.
On the other hand, a big hurricane that hits the Gulf of Mexico, cold weather that pumps up demand for heating oil or other unexpected events could derail falling prices.
One such event earlier this month, however, caused nary a ripple for pump prices. In August, after BP found corrosion damage on a pipeline in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay area, the flow of oil from that important domestic source was cut in half, to 200,000 barrels a day. Immediate predictions that fuel would cost up to $4 a gallon along the West Coast proved alarmist.
While the pipeline problem has helped to keep prices here lingering higher than in the rest of the country, prices didn’t soar. The regional average for retail gas prices went up just a couple cents in the days after the trouble at Prudhoe Bay.
“Despite the reduction in supply from Alaska, the oil companies seem to have been able to backfill from other sources,” said Frank Holmes, state manager for the Western States Petroleum Association in Olympia.
It helped, Holmes added, that the worldwide trading price for crude oil also has been on a downward trend in recent weeks. The price of crude oil represents more than half the cost for a gallon of gasoline, according to the U.S. Energy Department.
With fuel prices declining locally and nationally, AAA estimates 35 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more from home during the long Labor Day weekend, a 1 percent increase from last year.
Based on reports from her office, Ray said gas prices made people think harder about what type of vacations they took this summer, but it didn’t generally deter them from traveling.
“People are looking at their driving habits when planning,” she said. “But they’ve still been planning to go somewhere.”
Hulbert, who doesn’t plan to drive much this holiday weekend, said he’s among the large number of people who didn’t change how much they drove this summer.
“The prices just made me mad,” he said.
Next to him in the downtown Everett Tully’s coffee shop, 20-year-old Ashley Klumb said she hasn’t paid attention to how much gas has cost. She’s driving to Idaho this weekend, but her parents are chipping in gas money for the trip.
Dino Zotos of Everett said he was putting pricey premium gasoline into his Chevrolet to keep it running until he got it repaired recently. He saved money by switching to two wheels more often, though exercise was as much a motivation for that as the cost of gas, he said.
“I ride my bicycle whenever I can,” he said. “I try not to drive my car unless I’m making money.”
While Zotos and others can take a bit of satisfaction in not paying $3 a gallon anymore, that can’t be said of those who use diesel fuel. The average price for diesel in the region was still $3.49 a gallon Thursday.
An unscientific drive-by survey Thursday of two dozen gas stations in Everett, Marysville and Lake Stevens found a local average of $2.93 for regular unleaded. Twenty of those stations were charging less than $3 a gallon.
On the low side, Arco and 76 stations in north Everett were charging just under $2.86. Exxon and 76 stations at Lake Stevens Frontier Village and Shell stations in Marysville and Everett were at the high end, charging a tenth of a cent under $3.
Reporter Eric Fetters: 425-339-3453 or fetters@heraldnet.com.
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