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Frugal Gas Price Solutions

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Frugal Gas Price Solutions

 

Ways to cut your gas costs

 

 

On a trip to downtown Denver last year, (No, I don't get around much!) something crazy struck me. Why are there seventeen different people driving seventeen different vehicles, burning gallons of gas, all going to the same place!?

I don't know what it's like in Singapore now, but 20 years ago, it was illegal to drive downtown if you were in a vehicle alone. For safety's sake? Hardly! For traffic's sake. If you needed to go downtown, you either waited until someone else needed a ride and took them with you, or you found a ride with another person - sort of forced carpooling.

That would be an excellent scene in many of today's cities. It would be an excellent idea for our highways, too. Instead of burning gas like it was free, maybe it's time we put our frugal heads together and figured out how to survive high gas prices, dangerously dense traffic, lung searing air pollution and the emotional stress of driving in it all.

The first thing we can do is take a lesson from Singapore. Making driving alone illegal would probably make a lot of people angry and be a hard law to enforce for our already overworked police forces... BUT if we did what we could voluntarily to ease the congestion on the highways and in the cities and if we did what we could voluntarily to scale back our personal gas expenses, we'd all be money ahead.

How we drive, where we drive, what we drive and what kind of shape our vehicles are in all play important parts in how much gas we actually use.

Avoid hard braking, hard acceleration and hard driving altogether. Make sure your car or truck is tuned up and your tires properly inflated. Avoid dozens of short trips - if it's within walking distance, walk!

Take turns with your neighbors in going to the grocery store or the post office. Run errands for someone else while you're out and about, and they can run errands for you next time. Share rides and carpool every chance you get.

To do this effectively, we need to connect with as many others as possible to make the plan work best. Here is where ideas like AlterNetRides<http://frugalliving.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.alternetrides.com> come into place. This one is a national plan that can help you find a one time ride or a daily commute. Organizations use it to help their employees get back and forth, churches use it to help those who otherwise would have no ride at all, people like you and I use it to get from one side of the nation to another, from downtown back home, from one city to another.

Carpooling is nothing new. People have been doing that for years, officially and otherwise. The concept of a nationwide clearing house is what makes it more workable than ever. The beauty of it is that it does work, and having a system that expands over the entire nation while still providing local connections works very well.

With gas prices threatening to continue going up, there's no better time to put into practice the best gas saving strategies possible. A combination of these ideas will probably work best for you. Get used to them before it gets worse.

Like that shoe ad says.... just do it.

 

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."-- Mahatma Gandhi

 

 

 

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