And it gets more Crazy.

posted by Ben Engebreth on 08.31.2005 | comments - 0

Katrina, tragically, has inflicted tons of pain on the people living around the gulf coast. Whatever we suffer in higher gas prices is inconsequential in comparison to what they've gone through and likely still have to go through. However, since gas prices have for so long been a topic of this blog, I think it's alright to speak about the effects of the hurricane on future prices.

CNN is reporting that prices will likely hit $4 across the country in the weeks ahead. Four bucks seems like a pretty big pop in the national average to me, but I can see some places hitting that point for a short time. I just got an email from my brother, for example, about gas shortages in Georgia due to the supply pipelines that provide the city being shut down due to hurricane damage. He says that he's seeing gas prices in the $3-$5 range already and has heard of prices as high as $10! This will certainly (hopefully) be one of those temporary shocks that rights itself quickly when conditions return to normal, but it's not called a price shock for no reason. Evidently, the lines for gas are huge and there is a bit of (orderly) panic in the air.

I wish I had a bit better marketing skills and I could suggest to a larger audience of people that they take up carpooling now to help manage the price hikes. It would be great to walk away from this with a little bit of publicity for carpooling and gas conservation.

Continuing Price Escalation & Sorting Algorithm News

posted by Ben Engebreth on 08.21.2005 | comments - 0

It's shocking to look at, but gas prices have leaped in the last week and the latest report from AAA has the national average for regular unleaded at $2.60. It's hard to know what to say about this anymore. Prices are going up, but behavior doesn't seem to be changing too much yet. I think $3 is a pretty significant psychological point to hit. If we do see $3 gas, I think that people are really going to consider changing their travelling behavior & purchase decisions in order to limit driving expenses. Of course it's all speculation, but there has to be a point where the economics of it all merits a change.

In site news, I'm testing a new algorithm for the sorting of potential carpool partners for the site that should be more optimal in the way it sorts. I don't think it will make a difference with the relatively low density of users that Pooln currently has. However, in the future when there are (hopefully) more users of the site, it should help you find people who are more well suited to be your carpool buddy amongst a larger set of already well suited folks. It's basically just taking into account the advantage of having someone live or work along your commute route. For instance, if 2 people live 2 miles away from you, but one of them lives along your commute path, that person is the better person to carpool with. The current algorithm doesn't take this into account and only sees that these people live the same distance from you and thus scores them the same (on the home-home distance metric).

A reader suggested that I look into a way to make this change, and in a moment of clarity (I've thought about the problem before to no avail) I came up with a really easy straight forward solution. The only problem is translating it to a metric that I display in the search. Right now I display the sum of the home-home and work-work distances for potential carpool partners. That makes some physical sense (i.e. commute distance). This new algorithm doesn't have quite as nice of a numeric result. I'm thinking about how to better illustrate its meaning to the users still. More later I guess.

Oil & Users

posted by Ben Engebreth on 08.08.2005 | comments - 0

Wow, oil is above $63 this morning, another new record. As of today, gas prices have now topped the record set last month.

As far as site news goes, there was a small milestone reached over the weekend as we got our 100th user. Yes, 100 users isn't very many, but it's all about slow growth here. With each user we add the value of the site increases as it becomes easier for new users to find carpoolers closer to them. Hopefully we'll reach the next 100 even faster -- especially if gas/oil stays this high.

Gas Price Update

posted by Ben Engebreth on 07.11.2005 | comments - 0

Interestingly, gas prices hit a new high today relatively late in the summer. Actually, it's not too late in the summer, but it's late for the market to rally oil to highs in excess of $60 as prices usually rise in anticipation of summer not anticipation of the end of summer. MSNBC is reporting that this weeks average price for regular gasoline in the US is $2.33 -- a record in nominal terms. There's a nice chart on the page as well that shows the increasingly long-term trend of rising gasoline prices going back a couple of years now. I'm sure a chart showing the price of oil would trend similarly.

It's been interesting to watch the number of new users here pick up in the last couple of weeks in line with this return of gas prices to this springs earlier highs. I guess it's pretty intuitive for the two events to be correlated, but it's always interesting when intuition proves itself out.