Spreading the Word About Pump Prices

Almost every day, Alfred Diaz gets into his car in San Dimas and goes on a secret mission.

He drives a route to take him past several service stations and when he reaches one, Diaz, who is retired, makes a mental note of the posted gas prices. A block or two later, he pulls over to the side of the road to write the information down.

“I don’t want to sit in the driveway of a station to do this,” he said.

Diaz, 66, is among thousands of volunteers nationwide who feed the latest information on gas station prices to GasBuddy.com, a website drivers can use to seek out the lowest prices in a neighborhood.

The popularity of the site has ridden the coattails of rising gas prices. During July, the site was visited by 11.5 million people, according to GasBuddy co-founder Jason Toews. Last year, during the same month, the number of visitors was 6.3 million.

The advertiser-supported website is one of several online guides to gas station prices. Another site, GasPriceWatch.com, also gets its information from volunteer spotters.

A different approach is taken by sites sponsored by the American Automobile Assn. and MSN. They rely on credit card receipts and other data aggregated by the Oil Price Information Service.

All these sites are free, although only AAA members have access to the club’s gas price service.

How valuable are these sites? That depends on how much driving you do and on how much fuel your car/SUV/truck guzzles as you drive.

On a recent day in Glendale, prices at local stations listed on the sites ranged from $3.21 to $3.37 a gallon for regular. If your ride is a Ford Expedition, with a 28-gallon tank, the savings would be about $4.50 if you filled up at the cheapest station rather than at the most expensive.

For a Hummer H1 Alpha with a 51.5-gallon capacity (including auxiliary tanks), the savings per fill-up would be about $8.25.

Those are not huge savings when contrasted with the cost of fill-ups -- nearly $90 for the Expedition and about $165 for the Hummer at the cheapest station.

Of course, most of us drive cars with less gas capacity, and that makes the savings-per-tank far smaller -- usually much less than the cost of a bottle of water.

But savings do build up over time. And there is a factor beyond cost.

“I used to drive to work every day and feel that none of us have any control over these prices,” said Brian Hanable, 38, who lives in Redondo Beach and works for a movie special effects company in Hollywood. He posts daily to GasBuddy.com.

“At least I could let people know about where the prices were a little lower. It gave me a feeling I had some kind of control.”

And for some it’s a political act. “When you have people who are paying this much attention to gas prices,” said Anne Clark, a San Pedro resident who also posts daily, “you can start building a grass-roots movement to do something about it.”

So, which gas price comparison site is the best for users?

In accuracy, they were all right on target in tests I did in Glendale. I visited 10 stations, each of which was listed on at least one of the sites, and the prices were exactly as shown online. This was especially impressive because stations no longer formally restrict when prices can go up or down.

“It used to be that a change in price would happen at 12:01 a.m.,” said Andre van der Valk, who owns four local Shell stations. “Now, if we get a message from the oil company with a change in the wholesale price, it could happen any time.”

Where the sites did differ widely was in their comprehensiveness and ease of use.

GasBuddy was the better of the two spotter sites tested. Stations listed on the service could be searched by city or by ZIP Code. The site found five stations in Glendale with prices posted by spotters within the last 24 hours -- some were only a few hours old.

GasPriceWatch allows for searches by city, ZIP Code and even latitude/longitude (for GPS users) but it seemed to have few spotters, at least in Glendale. The site found only one station in the city with prices reported within the last day.

As attractively populist as the spotter sites were, the online services fed by the Oil Price Information Service proved to be far more comprehensive.

An executive at the Wall, N.J., office of the Oil Price Information Service said the company got pricing information on about 100,000 stations nationwide primarily from credit card companies.

The Southern California AAA site, which can be searched only by city, listed 20 stations in Glendale. The MSN service, which uses a ZIP Code search, listed 14 in that city (at least that I could find, plugging in various ZIP Codes).

Of the two types of searches -- city and ZIP Code -- city is generally more handy if you’re going to a fairly small metropolitan area. But having a ZIP Code option is vital if you are in a major city.

For example, the AAA site -- with no ZIP Code search option -- did not have individual listings for many parts of Los Angeles, including Hollywood, East Los Angeles and West Los Angeles. They were all lumped together in the Los Angeles category, which was so huge it ran to 30 pages when printed out. If time is money, you’ll be going into major debt by the time you find a local station in that listing.

The MSN service proved to be the most useful of all those tested. One of its best features was that it listed stations by price per gallon. And it showed their locations on a map. Its main fault was that it didn’t allow for city searches.

But GasBuddy -- which has a good search engine and produced a useful if not comprehensive list -- gets points for its human element. I like to think of Diaz, who obviously gets enjoyment out of sharing the lowest prices he finds.

Maybe too much enjoyment for family harmony.

“Drives my wife batty, in particular if her mother is in the car,” Diaz said. “Her mother doesn’t like it if I am looking at the gas station prices and not listening to what she’s saying.”

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Virtual search for cheaper gas

Free online services allow drivers to seek out gas station prices before hitting the road.

American Automobile Club

www.aaa-calif.com/corpinfo/fuel (click on “Southern California Gas Prices”)

Gets price information from: Oil Price Information Service

Search: By city

Pros: Accurate. Most comprehensive station listings.

Cons: Must be AAA member to use site. Big-city searches can be unwieldy.

GasBuddy

www.gasbuddy.com

Gets price information from: Spotters

Search: By city, ZIP Code

Pros: Accurate. Easy to use.

Cons: Found fewer stations than sites that use Oil Price Information Service.

GasPriceWatch

www.gaspricewatch.com

Gets price information from: Spotters

Search: By city, intersection, ZIP Code, latitude/longitude

Pros: Accurate. Best search engine choices.

Cons: Fewest number of stations checked.

MSN

autos.msn.com (click on “Gas Prices”)

Gas price information from: Oil Price Information Service

Search: By ZIP Code

Pros: Accurate. Ease of use. Search results shown on map as well as list.

Cons: Searches only by ZIP Code.

Los Angeles Times