Finding the Cheapest Gas in Town
Recently, I bought a Honda Civic to commute to school. I sold my last car two years ago and in the meantime, I rode my bike on all but the coldest days of the year. Needless to say, I didn’t pay much attention to gas prices. I didn’t know what a normal price should be, I didn’t know when prices would go up or down, and I didn’t know which stations had the best prices. However, after buying my Civic, I did begin to notice that the prices in my home town of Longmont were much lower than in Boulder. Longmont stations seemed to offer a gallon of gas for $0.10 less than Boulder stations did. I couldn’t tell if it was just my imagination, so I needed some help in educating myself about gas prices.
After a quick Google search, I found a website called gasbuddy.com . The website provides gas-price maps for any location in the US with a red price tag above the stations. Here’s Boulder:
Using this website, my suspicions about Longmont’s prices being cheaper were correct:
Gas.buddy.com also offers a free app for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry. From the app, you can search any location and see the local stations ranked by price or view them on a map. Most importantly, you can also report prices to the site as you drive by them. The prices are all user-submitted and GasBuddy holds drawings for pre-paid gas cards (usually $250) for users who report gas prices. The more prices you submit, the better your chances are of winning the drawing.
With this app and website, I’m not in the dark anymore about gas prices. I can quickly find the best price in my area, and save some $$ each time I fill up my beautiful and sporty Honda Civic. James Bond should be so lucky to have my car and the GasBuddy app in his pocket.
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