Dick Messer is paying a pretty good price these days to fuel his drive from Riverside to work: the equivalent of about $1.35 a gallon. But Messer, who has collected, restored and raced gasoline-powered cars for more than 50 years, isn't commuting on gasoline anymore to his job running the Petersen Automotive Museum in the mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles.
Messer still owns such classic rides as a 1963 Lincoln Continental, a 1953 Cadillac Fleetwood and a Saleen Mustang. Yet the only car Messer wants to talk about is the $24,000 Honda Civic GX that runs on compressed natural gas, which he bought in February 2008 as gasoline prices rose toward a July peak above $4 a gallon.
"I can get to the museum from my home in Riverside and back on one tank easily," driving alone in the carpool lane, Messer said. "I pay $1.35 a gallon to fill it up, and the price is capped at $1.99 a gallon. I'll never have to pay more than that. No matter what happens to the price of gasoline."
Messer is hardly alone in his aversion to steep gas prices. California drivers appear to believe that gasoline shouldn't cost more than $2 a gallon, and they have been proving it for nearly three years.
Gasoline consumption in California began falling in April 2006, and for 11 straight calendar quarters dropped below gas use in the year-earlier period even though the state added 790,000 new licensed drivers. First-quarter gasoline use hasn't yet been released by the California State Board of Equalization, which on Thursday said Californians consumed 1.21 billion gallons of gasoline in January, down 22 million gallons, or 1.8%, from the previous January.
Agency statistics show the pattern began between January and September 2005, when the average gas price climbed from $1.96 to $3.06.
That was California's first brush with $3-a-gallon gas. It lasted just two weeks in 2005, according to the Energy Department's weekly survey of filling stations, but it was long enough to trigger behavior changes.
For all of 2005, gasoline consumption rose by just 30 million gallons to 15.95 billion gallons, according to the state equalization board, which gathers the numbers from taxes paid by fuel distributors. The pace was well off the boom years from 2000 to 2004, when gas use grew by an average of 343 million gallons a year.
