Rising Gas Prices Spur Motorists to Get Creative

Gas prices continue to climb and motorists and gas stations are finding strategies to cope. In Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn on Easter Sunday weekend, it cost $3.99 a gallon for regular and $4.65 for premium to fill up. Yet the line for the Shell gas between Willoughby Street and Bedford Avenue can get so long that cars sometimes block traffic. “We still got a lot of  customers because people still have places to go,” Samba M, the cashier and manager said. 

At the beginning of April, AAA said, “The national average of regular gasoline exceeded $4/gallon for the first time since 2022.” In New York the average for regular gasoline was $4.09. The week before it was $3.92, and last month it was $3.22 according to AAA. 

In Perth Amboy, New Jersey, Diana Christophe said the price of gas the first week in April was  $4.09 a gallon. “I fill up my gas tank every three weeks or monthly. It depends if I do a long distance drive,” she said. Christophe pays about $40 dollars to fill up her tank. “It has limited my long distance drive to one time monthly.”

 Gas prices normally reach the lowest price of the year in February, and generally costs the most on big travel days like Memorial Day, according to the gasoline lobbying group NACS. But President Trump’s war against Iran, launched on February 28th 2026 created disruptions in shipping oil and natural gas from the Middle East through the Strait of Hormuz. That raised the price of oil to $110.39 per barrel at the beginning of April, according to Business Insider, and experts say it could continue to rise.

Gas prices at a Bedford Stuyvesant Shell Station. Photo by Joan Andre.

Some gas stations want to keep their customers and create special deals to hang on to them. The Brooklyn Shell station often reduces its price by an average of 10 cents a gallon. The manager, Samba, noticed that customers have also changed the way they pay, “People are using their points more to get discounts on the gas,” he said.

Others do serious price shopping. Jacques Dupont Jr owns a Nissan Pilot and a Pathfinder. He generally drives 108 to 110 miles roundtrip everyday. That takes a lot of gas. “I’m literally looking at $50 to fill my tank and by mid-week I’m looking at spending another $45,” he said.

On his routes he hunts down cheaper gas. He looks out for places that are not near the highway. He often uses an app called GasBuddy. 

Gas Buddy Senior-Vice President, Mark Coffey, promoted the need for the app when he  told Globe News Wire, “During this period of gas price volatility, the need to connect various gas station reward programs in one convenient spot has never been more prevalent.”

Jacques Dupont’s search for affordable gas takes him far from Brooklyn. Near the Jamaica Avenue exit on the Cross Island Parkway there’s a BP, Shell and Gulf that offer different prices. The prices vary between twenty and sixty cents a gallon. On Springfield Blvd, he found a Speedway with gas a dollar cheaper than the most expensive on Jamaica Avenue. 

Customers like Jacques worry about diluted gas at a time when everyone looks for bargains and maybe some gas stations try to cut corners. “There’s this thing about gas being mixed with water —- it’s not potent enough for your engine and it evaporates really fast,” he said. But customers have a hard time figuring out if a gas station is cheating. 

So Jacques in Brooklyn, and Diana Christophe in Perth Amboy, and other drivers continue to struggle to afford to fill up at the pump. “It’s frustrating because everything is going up,” Jacques said.