There aren't many things people can count on nowadays, friends and family included, but one of those rare things to count on is raising gas prices.
The price jumped nearly a quarter per gallon over the past two weeks, according to a nationwide survey report published on CNN.
The average price of a gallon of regular stood at $3.59 a gallon on Friday, according to the latest Lundberg Survey.
"That's up 24.75 cents from the survey's previous canvass of roughly 2,500 filling stations in the continental United States on January 25," publisher Trilby Lundberg told CNN.
In New Jersey, where it is illegal to self-serve, AA Mid-Atlantic says the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline on Friday was $3.56, up 11 cents from last week. That's also higher than the price from a year ago, when motorists were paying $3.44, according to trentonian.com.
In Connecticut, the average retail gasoline price has risen 3.9 cents per gallon in the past week, averaging $3.88 per gallon on Sunday, according to GasBuddy's daily survey of 1,540 gas outlets in Connecticut, according to thehour.com.
"If anything positive came about as a result of Winter Storm 'Nemo' it may be that the resulting 'demand destruction' seems to have flattened out the rate at which prices had been increasing in the Northeast and the Midwest too," said Senior Petroleum Analyst Gregg Laskoski, reported thehour.com.
Across the country in San Diego, California, the average price of a gallon of self-serve regular gasoline rose seven-tenths of a cent Monday to $4.149, its highest amount since Oct. 29, reported 10news.com.
The average price has risen 14 consecutive days "rising 42.2 cents over that span, including eight-tenths of a cent on Sunday," according to figures from the AAA and Oil Price Information Service, stated 10news.com.
The sharp rise in Californian prices is the result of low levels of production in Southern California stemming from refinery maintenance, according to Jeffrey Spring of the Automobile Club of Southern California, according to 10news.com.
On a national level, Lundberg feels that it is due to prices on international markets going up substantially in recent weeks and both planned outages and unscheduled maintenance as American refineries gear up for higher demand in the spring and summer have put a crimp in supply," according to CNN.
The highest average prices in the latest Lundberg Survey were in Los Angeles, at $4.10 a gallon. The lowest were found in Billings, Montana, at $3.05.
Courtesy of CNN, below is a sampling of prices in other cities:
-- Albuquerque, New Mexico: $3.14
-- Boston: $3.72
-- Charleston, South Carolina: $3.41
-- Chicago: $3.93
-- Denver: $3.24
-- Houston: $3.41
-- Long Island, New York: $3.93
-- Miami: $3.65
-- Memphis, Tennessee: $3.33
-- Portland, Oregon: $3.51
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
