The Russians Are Coming!

Intrepid explorer Jim McElroy visits the East Coast:

I just returned from a fly/drive trip to the East Coast, where I drove from Bay Ridge Brooklyn to Ithaca New York, across Northern NJ and a corner of PA into Central Upstate NY. I thought that the attached photo is of interest. It is located just off Exit 4 on I-280 in Northern NJ. The date was Oct 20.

One would think this station was a outlying discounter, but I saw at least three of them on the trip, all with the same prices. Other stations in the area were displaying prices from $3.339 to $3.399, except for the Chevron station just across the street which showed $2.939. I'd never heard of this company before so I Googled it and found their web page, which was very interesting. It is a Russian Oil Company, which as far as I was able to determine only had refineries in Russia and a few Eastern European Countries. They refine the gas in Russia, ship it to the US by tanker, probably landing it in the New Jersey Ports. They seem to be setting up a chain of retail stations, undercutting the US oil companies by about 50 cents per gallon. There are so many questions about how this happened, or is happening, that it is worthy of further investigation.

In other related topics, the road systems in the East are in way better shape than California roads, especially the smaller state and county road systems. This is in spite of the much more severe weather conditions. They actually maintain the roads. The flip side of this is that you encounter a lot more construction delays, especially in fall before the first freeze. Traffic load is about the same.

The weekend before this trip was spent driving from San Jose to San Diego and back via Santa Barbara and I was amazed at the reduction in traffic relative to a year ago. On a Friday afternoon about 6PM we traveled the speed limit between US101 and I-5 over Pacheco Pass. Most of that was due to the new overpass at 152/156 but even so traffic was very light. The traffic along I-5 south was representative of a mid-week day, not a fall weekend. Also, the endless stream of trucks were all traveling at 60 mph or slightly lower, and few cars were going over the 70mph speed limit. It has finally sunk in that slower travel costs less. The reduction in travel and the slower speeds are sufficient explanation for the reduction in fuel consumption. I am however, still predicting a noticeable bump in prices shortly after Nov 4, maybe as much as 10 percent. We'll see.