I got my paycheck for last week. It turned out to be a whopping $2.34. I guess I better hurry up and cash it while I can still get a gallon of gas with it. 
Yes, yes and I used to live in Watford and commute to Epsom, which is 45 miles each way. And my friend lives in Wembley and commutes to Oxford, which is about 60 miles each way. Except that at the moment he’s on secondment to somewhere in the Black Country and commutes something like 100 miles each way.
Believe it or not, the UK has the longest commutes in Europe. We average 45 minutes each way… and that includes all those people that have a 5 or 10 minute walk.
And don’t talk to me about housing costs. I just paid $0.5m for a small 2.5 bedroom mid-terraced house in the middle of nowhere with no local amenities, no local transport links, no nothin’. And it needs a lot of work doing to it. We have about a quarter of the country living in a 50 mile radius around the centre of London. That makes for an extremely densely populated and hence expensive housing bloc.
pan
While the prices here in Texas are near an all-time high, they’re still lower than the prices all of you whiners are quoting!
[Nelson] HA-ha! [/Nelson]
Where the hell is it $5.50 for a pint of beer?
Oh wait, that’s dollars. Just out of curiousity, has the price of a beer gone up in the past few years? When I was in the UK in 2001, we paid about 2.50 pounds for a pint. Maybe it’s just looking artificially high in dollars because of the currency plummet.
Actually. £2.50 will still buy you a pint in all but the most expensive places. And by today’s currency exchange standards, that works out at $4.50, not $5.50
But I’ve paid £5.50 (or $10) for a simple gin and tonic before now, so who knows?
pan
Got gas for $1.67[sup]9[/sup] this morning.
It’s $1.83 here in small town Ohio.
This would have killed us before the move. We were both driving 60 miles or so each way. Our average monthly gas bill was over $1000.
Now, of course, Lady Chance telecommutes from our home office and I have a 2 mile bike ride. Color me the king of good timing.
I make that $101.03 per gallon! You definitely win the “most expensive petrol” prize!
The bottom line is that anytime you have consumers facing a price increase, they’re gonna bitch and that’s pretty much universal around the world. Hearing that it’s $6 a gallon in some far away place doesn’t make the guy who’s suddenly shelling out an extra $10 at the pump to fill up his tank feel any better. Thinking “Well we’re still paying less than those other guys” doesn’t do much to fill up the empty spot in your wallet. This holds true for any commodity, be it gasoline, milk, food or whatever.
Of course, bitching about rising prices while voluntarily spending $3.75 on a bottle of TAP WATER does make me scratch my head… 
EZ
Right now there should be a “who should be” somewhere in there. 
</hijack>
duffer - what kabbes said. Also, in 2001, rail and bus trips accounted for only 12% of passenger-kilometers. Car trips covered 86%. Cite. Now try telling us that we Brits don’t rely on our cars as much as you do, thanks to our wonderful public transport system.
I don’t have a definite cite for this but, despite the high cost of petrol, in my experience over longer journeys it often works out cheaper to travel by car than by train.
US$1.66/gallon here in San Juan (dispensed at 43.9 cents/litre). And people still complain…
I never even considered that it could be taken that way.
There is! There are some things that are zero-rated, books, fresh fruit and veg, and, for some odd reason, children’s clothing. Other than those…
19 p was the going rate for a pint in the pub back in 75 when I lived in Lincolnshire for four months. At 250 p that is 13 times what I paid. You guys really have something to complain about.
I think most food is zero rated. I know the whole thing is a bit of a mess but this very long document tells you what is zero rated and the exceptions to the rules :-
Thanks gum and Una for taking care of my part in this thread.
My car uses diesel, which is somewhat cheaper (about € .77 per liter right now, or $3.45 per US gallon), but last weekend when filling up my motorbike with regular petrol, the liter price was €1.245.
$5.57 per US gallon. And that baby isn’t exactly economical when I gun it.
I paid $1.99 for 93 octane this morning here in Connecticut.
Here in the Las Vegas area gas average is like 2.17 a gallon, the highest price I have seen for regular gas was like 2.25. But the gas station by my house has gas for 2.09 a gallon. Still, it sucks and I have a car with good gas milage. It will probably be another record profit year for the petrol companies :rolleyes:
Bus fare is reasonable.
However, getting around Los Angeles in a bus is a dicey propostition at best. It would take me about 6 hours to get to work by bus. God help me if I wanted to get* back * by bus.
Here, we can get gas as low as $2.09 a gallon, upwards to $2.25.
:dubious: You should average 50-55 mpg on that bike.