“LI may take gas prices in stride again”, Ellis Henican Column, Newsday, March 6, 2011
Long Island gas prices shot up another 14 cents last week, sending the average price of a gallon of regular unleaded to $3.68.
You do the crazy math: If prices keep rising like this, your gas costs could easily top your car payment by June.
What kind of mileage are you getting from that Hummer, anyway?
Most of this pump-price jumpiness can be traced to the Middle East. My best experts say that if one side doesn’t crush 
the other soon in Libya, we can figure on $4-a-gallon gas on Long Island by Memorial Day.
“If the turmoil spreads to Saudi Arabia,” warns Tom Kloza, chief analyst at the Oil Price Information Service, “you’ll see people predicting $7 a gallon.”
And paying it, too, if past gas crises are any indication.
Not everybody is looking at the latest price spike as a major disaster. At the Long Island Rail Road, no one’s done the precise calculations yet. But at week’s end, officials were poring over a new study from the 
American Public Transportation Association. The key conclusion: People who commute by rail instead of driving now save, on average, $825 a month. That’s two car payments, if you just need a junker to run to and from the train.
Maybe these higher gas prices will send a few Long Islanders to the railroad station. Maybe it’ll goose Kia sales. Maybe it’ll even encourage walking and biking and a second look at the coming Long Island Bus cuts.
But probably not. Or not for long.
The last time we were here was the summer of 2008. Prices at Nassau and Suffolk stations hit $4.35 that July.
Everyone was outraged.
And all of us said so.
As we sat in the same old rush-hour traffic jams and lined up with our maxed-out credit cards at the pump.
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