MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“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.
E-mail ellis@henican.com.
Follow him at twitter.com/henican
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I remember when this happened during the Jimmy Carter administration. I was 25 years old and had just landed a sales position on Park Avenue South with a Dutch Manufacturer of printing machines. So the office manager gives me the keys to a station wagon with one unit in the back.I remember there was a gas station near the Midtown Tunnel on E.34 Street. This was my first day on the job. When I got within three blocks of the gas station, there was a serpentine line of cars and I had of course had to bring up the rear. I had courage as a young man but I feared losing my job or running out of gas. From then on for what seemed to be an interminable time constraint, we had to wait in those gas lines.It became a Tokyo Rose feeling every time we got in our cars.
So what are you suggesting, Ellis?? That if only those driving Hummers and SUV’s would downsize, we could impact the middle eastern countries that are causing the gas prices to rise??
The problem I have, and maybe I am judging your words here wrongly, is that almost everyone on the left, screams FOUL, when we go to fight a conflict in the middle east. They say “It’s all about the oil!!”…
Well, as you point out… we all sit with maxed out credit cards at the pumps… If our attempts to settle unrest in oil producing countries was ONLY to keep Americans from going bankrupt do to high gasoline costs, or from freezing to death in the winter from not being able to afford heating oil… Isn’t that reason enough??