Cost of US petrol means economy is running on empty

Despite a drop in oil prices last week that helped move the price of oil away from US$4 a gallon, filling up a tank in New York is still a painful experience - and indicative of larger problems with the economy.

The doubling of petrol bill in less than a decade is one of the greatest obstacles to real recovery in the US. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images / AFP)

Driving a car in Manhattan has never been a very good idea. The traffic is awful, cops eager to ticket even the mildest moving violation lurk on every corner and petrol is among the priciest in the country.

Filling your tank in New York is a painful experience, despite a drop in oil prices last week that helped edge the price away from US$4 a gallon.

We owned a Land Rover when we lived in Manhattan and filling it up used to require complex financial planning. Even a move over the bridge to Brooklyn failed to lessen our pain as the Discovery's 24.6 gallon tank would cost between $73 (Dh268.13) and $98 to fill, depending on how close to $3 or $4 a gallon the price happened to be. That was in 2009. When we moved to New York in 2001 the average annual price of a gallon in the United States was less than $2.

This virtual doubling of the country's petrol bill in less than a decade is one of the greatest obstacles to real recovery in the US, if not the world.

On a trip home last week we discovered just how hard petrol price rises have hit America.

We were driving from my sister-in-law's house on Long Island, via our house in Brooklyn, to Paterson, New Jersey to visit my wife's 99-year-old grandfather in hospital, a journey of about 56km.

The petrol tank on the borrowed Toyota Corolla we were driving registered E for empty when we left Long Island and the light came on as we entered the Midtown Tunnel into Manhattan. But we would be fine, I thought. Having spent many a late night driving around the city looking for the least painful locale to fill up the Land Rover, I have a map of all the city's petrol stations burnt so deeply into my subconscious that I could find them in my sleep. Neuroscientists call it traumatic memory syndrome.

Being on 34th Street, the nearest petrol station, I remembered, would be 11 blocks south on 23rd. But the station was, inexplicably, no longer there. No problem, I assured my somewhat incredulous passengers, I will head nine blocks further downtown to the Chelsea petrol station on the West Side Highway at 14th Street. But after 10 more minutes of nail-biting driving on fumes we arrived at a boarded-up petrol station with black rubbish bags over all the pumps.

Beginning to perspire slightly, despite a chill Hudson River breeze, I headed yet further downtown to an old cabbies' favourite in the West Village near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. But that, too, had disappeared.

I began to make a mental inventory of cargo we could jettison in an effort to squeeze a few more miles out of the empty tank. But all we had was the baby's car seat that New York law requires you to use and the last thing I needed was a ticket.

An old Hess station on 44th street and 10th Avenue, all the way back up to Midtown, was our only hope.

Thankfully we made it, the Hess was still open and the fumes we had lived on for the past hour or more kept the engine ticking as we waited on line with the cabs and town cars.

New York is not alone. Petrol stations are closing all across the US as high prices at the pump take their toll.

Economists are still pondering whether the spike in oil prices this spring, caused by the Strait of Hormuz stand off with Iran, will stifle the already-wheezing US economic recovery.

Some - including those at the US Department of Energy - are even celebrating the recent $10 drop in the price of oil with a prediction of $3.79 a gallon for petrol this summer, as if such a price were a bargain.

But the evidence on the streets of New York shows that the damage to the real economy has already been done.

The price of oil will have to come down much further still, and for a sustained period, for real recovery to take hold in America or anywhere else.

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