FOCUS: GAS PRICES
More motorists change their habits as gas prices hit 'tipping point'
At some point, the price of gas would become too much. At some point, motorists would decide they were finally going to make a change.
Some point came this year, when the price of a gallon of gasoline passed $4. And it’s only getting worse, as the average price hit $4.18 Monday in metropolitan Buffalo, up by 32 percent from a year ago.
Evidence that drivers are changing their behavior is everywhere.
• Ridership on public transportation is up in dozens of metro areas.
• Bicycle shops are seeing sales increase and say the buyers are there not for exercise, but to save money.
• Companies are trying to help employees start car pools or facilitating telecommuting.
What follows are stories of some local people who have made changes that they felt forced to make.
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The full-sized conversion van was a good buy 10 years ago when John Carey and his wife had five young children and a dog to cart around. But with only three children still living in their Niagara Falls home — two of whom are now of driving age — the van had become a relic.
What’s more, it’s a gas hog that got 15 miles per gallon. “It had to go,” Carey said. He donated the van to City Mission a few months ago and decided to see if he and his family could get by on their remaining car, an old, compact Chevy Prism.
That’s when he began taking a good, hard look at the Trek 10-speed bike that had been collecting dust in his garage for the last year. If he biked to work, he figured, he would save on gas, get some exercise and reduce the family’s driving burden.
So he got the bad rear wheel fixed and started taking it to work last month.
Carey, a fire captain at Fire House 9 on Military Road, had a four-mile commute by car. That one-way ride is six miles by bike because Carey, 47, takes the bike path along the Robert Moses Parkway to get to work.
It’s a 30-minute leisurely bike ride to work in good weather, he said, 20 minutes if he’s in a hurry. When the weather is poor, his wife drops him off. Otherwise, he said, he finds sharing the bike path with other bikers, runners and skaters more pleasant than driving.
He’s also saving more than $100 in gas each month.
Carey says he will bike for as long as the good weather lasts.
After summer, however, his family will likely look at getting another car. There’s no denying that being a one-car family has meant sacrifices, he said.
The next car just won’t be a gas hog like the van.
— Sandra Tan
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With a daily commute from Colden to Grand Island, Steve Ockler is really feeling the pinch from gas prices.
He drives a Hyundai Elantra, no gas guzzler, but he calculated that making his 76-mile, round-trip commute five days a week would cost him $200 in gas per month.
That’s why he started carpooling in mid-April with coworker Bob Atwood, who lives in Orchard Park.
“I guess you don’t think about it, and all of a sudden you see gas prices climbing. It just kept climbing,” said Ockler, 57, who works in sales for GP:50, which manufactures pressure instrumentation.
Ockler and Atwood are among a number of Western New Yorkers driven to carpooling by the cost of commuting.
Some turned to neighbors and co-workers, while others sought partners on Web sites such as www.goodgoingwny.com or wnycarpool.com. Area companies are pushing ride-sharing, too, with Ecology & Environment leading a large contingent of businesses that encouraged carpooling on Earth Day in April.
“As long as [your company] is big enough, you can always find someone close enough to you to make it work,” said Eric Lindstrom, an associate vice president at Cannon Design who started carpooling in January and who leads that firm’s “green” initiatives.
Ockler and Atwood, 45, GP:50’s director of sales, generally carpool two or three days per week, depending on Atwood’s travel schedule.
The two old friends meet at the NFTA Park & Ride in Orchard Park, at Routes 219 and 20A, at 7:30 a. m. and drive in together in Ockler’s Elantra or Atwood’s Isuzu Rodeo.
Atwood acknowledges that if gas were still $1 a gallon, they wouldn’t be carpooling, but he has observed that they are hardly alone in adjusting their driving habits.
“I’ve noticed,” Atwood said, “that [the Park & Ride] lot is getting fuller and fuller.” — Stephen T. Watson
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Caroline Garas, a pre-med student at Canisius College, has a great summer job at a biochemistry lab at UB’s South Campus.
Just one problem.
“Limited funds,” said the 20-year-old, who lives in Clarence with her family.
That’s really a dilemma when your car is a mid-1990s Nissan sedan that gets only 18 miles per gallon or so and is in “very bad shape” to boot.
So Garas drives a few miles to the NFTA’s Transitown Park & Ride lot and hops a bus for the 13-mile ride to her job.
“It’s so easy,” Garas said on a recent late afternoon as she exited the bus, one of the NFTA’s hybrids. Her bus ride on Main Street — portions of which are notorious for bumper-to-bumper commuter traffic — takes about 25 minutes.
And since she’s not doing the driving, she’s not stressing out. Instead, she relaxes. “I read or whatever,” she said.
That route now has 118 daily riders, an 11 percent increase since 2006, said NFTA spokesman C. Douglas Hartmayer.
Another newcomer as of this month is Phil Teibel of Williamsville, production and facilities manager for WNED-TV downtown. Teibel said he reads or enjoys the scenery for the 25- to 30-minute trip — about five minutes longer than when he was driving his 1994 Acura.
The change wasn’t “a necessity” for him. But he’s giving it a try now that WNED has joined an NFTA program called Metro Advantage. It allows employees to pay for monthly bus passes with pretax dollars.
For Teibel, that equals about $49 a month — a savings of about 50 percent over driving his car.
He wishes there were more express buses for him to use, but so far the experience has been “generally good.”
— Niki Cervantes
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Martin Gordon keeps his Toyota Camry hybrid out of the left lane when he commutes from Clarence to Rochester.
Gordon, a professor of mechanical engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology, drives from his home in Clarence to RIT four to five times per week during the school year. Buying a hybrid and slowing down are some of Gordon’s weapons in the battle against gas costs.
“I’ve noticed if I cut my speed by 6 to 7 mph, I get five miles more per gallon,” he said.
With classes ended, the summer provides temporary relief from the long commute, but his consulting work at Moog in East Aurora requires that he be on the road all year long.
Gordon is trying to save some cash not only by how he drives, but what he drives. The Camry hybrid he purchased a year ago gets nearly 40 miles per gallon.
“It sort of forced me to buy a new car,” Gordon said of his job in Rochester. “I knew I wanted a car that was better on gas.”
In January 2007, Gordon’s old Saturn broke down, and he was forced to drive his family’s second car, the fuel-guzzling Ford F150. That was his inspiration for buying a hybrid.
Living so far from where he worked was only supposed to be temporary for Gordon and his family. Originally from Rochester, he attended the University at Buffalo and, after graduation in 1982, stayed in Western New York.
Gordon and his wife and two daughters planned on moving when he was hired at RIT in 1995, but affordable living and an affinity for the area enticed them to stay.
Even with Gordon’s long commute, he ranks second to his wife, Jill, in racking up miles. Jill Gordon works in home health and drives all over Western New York to get to her clients.
The couple’s 17-year-old daughter, Amanda, has recently inherited the F150. Their younger daughter, Abby, is 15 and will be behind the wheel soon, prompting Gordon to lament, “We’re definitely a high-mileage family.”
— Andrew Rafferty
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Coleen Czechowski of Alden not only changed her driving habits to offset ever-increasing gasoline prices, she changed her lifestyle.
A travel agent for Gorge Travel in Lewiston, Czechowski has a daily commute of 100 miles. Three tanks of gas for her “crossover” vehicle at roughly $60 a pop.
Czechowski said she buys gas only on the Native American reservation, using a credit card that pays her a 5 percent rebate. She combines trips, stopping at the bank, grocery store, post office or library on her way to or from work.
For Thruway driving, she sets cruise control at 55 and notices the miles-per-gallon reading jump a couple of notches. Having an E-ZPass to cruise through toll plazas is a “no-brainer,” Czechowski said.
There are other adjustments she has made that aren’t necessarily driving-related but enable her to save money for gas, she said. Those changes began several years ago, after travel industry workers felt the ripple effect from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“I increased my deductible on my car insurance, my home insurance and even my health insurance,” Czechowski said. “That’s about a week’s worth of gas for the year.”
Coupon-clipping. Shopping at discount stores for sale items. Paying most bills online. By doing the last one, “I save about $8 a month,” Czechowski said. “That’s $96 a year. That’s about a tank and a half of gas.”
This past winter, Czechowski signed up for a 13-session financial- planning course offered at Alden Mennonite Church, thinking: “If I came out of it learning one thing, it was worth it.”
One thing she learned was to ask businesses if they offered discounts for cash payments on big-ticket items. She got the answer on the third call while pricing a dog fence.
“I saved $250 just by asking a question,” Czechowski said. And that’s six tanks of gas, she notes.
“It all sounds like nickels and dimes,” Czechowski said, “but when you add it all up, it’s a whole lot of money.” — Janice L. Habuda
