Cut your gas bills now!

 

Here's how:

Drive less. 

Americans these days see driving someplace at least once a day whether they need to or not as a fundamental right. Spend a little time outside any supermarket and you’ll see many shoppers with one bag, partially full. They shop three or four times a week. (I know someone who goes to Wegman’s every day. It’s a thing, apparently.) Our economy is based on consumerism (around 70 percent) and we’ve been made to feel bad if we’re not participating in it. We’ve been sold the paranoid proposition that “it’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it” about thousands of consumer items—toilet paper, guns, pickup trucks and big cars—by corporations that laugh behind our backs at our gullibility.

• Schedule one day a week on which no one in your two-car (or three or more, if you have kids over sixteen) drives at all. It won’t be easy for most because it’s not “normal” but it is possible for many. Think of that: Fifty-two days a year of not using a drop of gas!
   
• Plan ahead when shopping. Make a good list and remember to ask others in your household for input. Warn them that if they don’t ask for it now, they won’t get it until later in the week
   
• Make your own coffee. The line to the Starbucks drive-through in Devon often backs up onto Lancaster Avenue. Many in it drive their three-ton cars six miles round trip daily to idle in line for their sugar-enriched cup of overpriced coffee. Stop that. Starbucks will be fine even if you do
• Drive no more than five miles over the speed limit. Put your phone away while driving. You know how at least once a trip someone honks at you while you’re checking text messages because the light has changed and then you floor it to make up for lost time? Back in the olden days, driver’s ed teachers called that a “jackrabbit start,” and they waste fuel
• Car pool. Chances are someone near you goes to the train station when you do, or returns at the same time as you, and that one or both of those trips could be eliminated. Someone nearby probably attends the same house of worship as you