We were doing so well. After the price went up to $5 a gallon not that long ago and then later was on its way down to just a little over $3 a gallon.

Last week filling the car cost me $3.11 a gallon. The same station yesterday was at $3.29 a gallon.

And wasn’t the prediction that a gallon would cost less than $3 early in the New Year?  Well, we are into the New Year.

The average price in Maine is now at $3.38 per gallon. The national average is $3.35.

So what happened to $3? For the New Year?

First here are a couple of years of trends from Gas Buddy dot com for the Bangor region.

attachment-gas buddy graph
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So overall we are in better shape than we have been for a while, but supply and demand suggest that gas prices should still be falling. There is less usage in the winter.  AAA says the reason is the days are shorter which leads to less driving at night, and with any bad weather less driving occurs as well. So demand is down, but prices are rising.

The primary factor for the latest increase is the higher cost of oil, and that’s why we are paying more at the pump. Not the news we wanted or expected here in the new year.

I guess we have it good compared to Hawaii and California which continue to be the most expensive places in the country for gasoline.

But also, it sure looks like we are not going back to the 'good ole days' when gas was a buck something. Or even less.

Photo by Chris Haws on Unsplash
Photo by Chris Haws on Unsplash
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LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.

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