So the government of Québec has just put a system in place, where every fuel station in the province is required to notify the government of their prices for gasoline. (There are fines for stations that don’t update their data.) And the prices are made available on a map for the general public: https://regieessencequebec.ca/
(Note to U.S. folks: the prices are per litre, in Canadian dollars.)
I’m sure some other similar sites exist, government-run or not.
Do you find this kind of initiative helpful?
My first impression is that this will just result in crowding at the least expensive stations until they run dry. Many people will spend 15 bucks of fuel to drive across town and wait in line (with the engine running) to save 2 bucks.
Because all that info is also made available to all the reasonably nearby competitor stations, It will invite stations to converge to a standard price. Anyone who’s real low and doesn’t make it up on sodas and hot dogs and coffee will quickly realize they ought to raise their prices.
There are all sorts of interesting unintended consequences of full price transparency for fungible goods.
It appears they update the website’s prices daily at midnight local. It would be very interesting to have the complete data feed for each day for the next couple of months (or from whenever this went online) to see how the stations’ behavior changes with this tool.
There is. GasBuddy, for one, does this in the United States and Canada. And the availability of the information only has a limited effect on decision making. I might go to a more expensive station if the cheaper one is less convenient or cash only.
Most people completely ignore broader gas trends and generally do NOT hunt for the cheapest prices in a given area. Virtually nobody is aware of when their state indulges in price cycling, as invariably the day after another price peak I’ll see tons of vehicles at most every station I pass.