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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>Still, people want to know who's responsible for these high prices? There's an interesting article on CNN which reports on surveys done by CNN & company finding that most people are predominately blaming oil producing countries, oil companies, and the president. I think the most interesting statistic though is that 78% of those polled called gas prices "not fair."
While I completely sympathize with anyone who is suffering from the economic impact of higher gas prices, I think it may be going a bit too far to call gas prices unfair. It's easy to forget that oil & gas react to market forces just like any other commodity that experiences real (or perceived) scarcity, and markets try to price things as fairly as they can (though there's no arguing that bubbles sometimes exist).
Retailers are constantly competing to bring goods and services to their customers at better and better prices (often by reducing quality or durability it seems). For better or worse, this doesn't happen with oil & gas. There was a period of time were gas seemed to be getting cheaper and cheaper -- I remember it being in the 70 cent range in Georgia around 1997 -- but that was certainly an anomaly. I'm just guessing here, but I think some of us may have thought that gas prices would behave in the same way -- that things were "solved" with regard to gas prices and that we had figured out how to keep things reasonably priced through competitive markets. This doesn't appear to be the case.
If I were polled, I would have blamed speculation of future demand growth outpacing supply growth as the reason for the recent price increase. You can't really pin that on anyone, and you can't really have anyone fix it. That's not to say that there isn't a solution to the problem, but the solution probably isn't going to come by finding a way to make gas cheap again. The solution is to do more with less. And I don't mean do less and also use less but really do more with less.
There's cool quote here where a GE executive says that "We're at a tipping point where energy efficiency and emission reductions also equal profitability." I think he's likely right. The next decade could be one where individuals and companies that are aware of the financial benefits of energy efficiency have a distinct advantage over those that don't (Toyota vs. GM). People have been predicting it for a while, but maybe that time has finally come.
]]>What's the benefit of this? I think that's still largely to be determined, but I can give a hypothetical example of it's potential. Say this buddy that you friended is your only Pooln friend. There's still some good information that you may be able to use just by having one friend. Say your pal has a couple of Pooln friends besides you. When you do a carpool search or look at any other Pooln user profile you'll be made aware of those people that are friends of your friend. Perhaps you already know some of these people and hadn't noticed them on the site yet. Hopefully this will tip you off to their being Pooln users and then you can friendify them (you'll see a big <foaf> by their name -- it stands for Friend of a Friend). But even if you don't know them, you now have a direct reference to check in the event that the person is a good potential carpool partner for you. You can ask your buddy about their friend so-and-so. A person who was a stranger (the friend of your friend) is now someone you can ask someone you trust about.
That's the idealized theory, and Pooln is a test of that -- and other -- theories. That's why this place is an experiment. Through a process of trial and error we'll hopefully find good techniques for finding carpool partners.
So, if you're friends with someone else using Pooln, add them as a friend by clicking on the add as friend link on their profile page. When they accept your offer, you will be made friends in the system and hopefully that relationship will provide some information that will benefit your search for a carpool pal.
]]>It's unfortunate that we can't all get hybrids as soon as we'd like, but I think that the lengths that people are willing to go to aquire one is quite significant. It's pretty exciting to see people embracing such a positive new technology in such an unexpectedly big way.
]]>Other than that, I've should point out these other things before I forget about 'em:
Having said that, let's get back to the news. The big story in the last 24 hours has been a statement by Goldman Sachs that oil may have entered a "super spike" period. Right now oil is trading at the $57 and change level. Goldman said it might be possible to see up to $105 a barrel if there were to be any disruptions in production. They seem to think that the current capacity cushion is too low to allow for much variation in output. Combined with rapidly increasing consumption from China and India it's obvious that Goldman feels there's a whole lot of upward price pressure. While there's a lot of good points made here, it is worth noting that Goldman has a financial interest in the industry and they would certainly benefit to some degree if prices went as high as they are speculating.
]]>Encouragingly, the same MSNBC article has a link to a reader survey which asks whether or not higher gas prices are causing people to change their driving habits. As of now, more than 2/3 of the respondents have answered yes. Unfortunately these online surveys have plenty of sources of error and there have only been 450 odd respondents thus far. Still, it's encouraging news that people are looking for ways to reduce their driving -- hopefully without too much inconvenience.
]]>These updates are as much for me as anyone else. We'll see if I continue them at the current level of detail or go higher or lower. Of course I'm working on new additions which will trickle out from time to time as well.
Gas prices are still breaking records daily. The current national average is $2.116 today breaking the previous record of $2.106 set yesterday.
]]>Fueling Change reports on an interesting survey done by AAA Colorado which claims that 42 percent of Colorado drivers have made changes to their driving habits as a result of the recent price increases. It goes on to say that an additional 42 percent won't make changes until or unless gas prices hit $2.50 a gallon.
The most mentioned changes in driving habits were using mass transit, reducing discretionary driving, and the consideration of new fuel efficient vehicles such as the Hybrid Civic or Prius.
Carpooling was not on the list.
It's hard to deny that carpooling is a good way to reduce fuel consumption. Carpooling is, on the other hand, hard to arrange. That is, it's hard to find someone to carpool with -- especially acting on your own. This has got to be the reason more people don't consider it. If you aren't lucky enough to know someone at work who happens to live down the street from you, well, you're out of luck with regard to carpooling. Of course if we imagine all the people that work with or close by us along with all the people that live near us, it seems that there's likely to be somebody in those two groups who would be a good candidate for us to carpool with.
I wonder what what AAA would find if they asked drivers if they would carpool if they could. If we got all the people together who wanted to carpool -- the if they could-ers -- certainly we could sit down and find people in this group for whom it would be beneficial to carpool with eachother based on where they lived and worked. We'd probably find a bunch of options for any one person if we had the patience to do it. Maybe it turns out some of these people already knew one another. Or maybe they kindof know of eachother through a common friend. Those lucky folks would obviously have that if they could barrier removed pretty quickly. For those that didn't know one another but were geographically speaking good potential carpool buddies, maybe they could get together for coffee or something and see if their personalities were compatible enough to endure on the daily commute. Maybe they'd be more than compatible. Maybe some of these people would become friends in addition to carpooling with one another. We'd probably get a lot of people carpooling if we could do all that. Man that'd be cool.
Now we just need to get a website to approximate all this. :)
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