With gas prices reaching a new high for this year, it’s pricey for students, faculty and staff to get back and forth to campus.
The national price of regular gas is $3.87, according to GasBuddy.com, a site that provides real-time, national average price searches for gas by city, state and zip code.
The price of gas around the Triad has reached up to $3.86 per gallon, a whopping 53 cent more than six months ago when it was $3.33.
Prices at the two gas stations near the campus on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive during the third week in the month of April average to $3.86.
These prices fluctuate throughout a day because the cost of gas is directly influenced by the cost of crude oil, according to Financial Nut, a business, finance and economics website.
“I spend around $40 to $60 a week in gas driving back and forth to campus,” said Jimmy O’Neal, senior management information system major, from Fayetteville.
O’Neal lives in Winston-Salem.
“I have no other choice but to drive to school,” O’Neal said.
“The average citizen is bearing the cost of about $4,000 for fuel annually per vehicle,” said Brent McKinney, director of Piedmont Authority for Regional Transportation.
“You can take a nice vacation with that.”
Alternatives and less expensive solutions for WSSU commuters are the Triad’s public transportation options: PART, Winston-Salem Transit Authority, High Point Transit, and Amtrak. PART provides connections between major cities and counties throughout the Triad.
“PART is a unique public service and may be the only service provided by the government that allows the users to save large amounts of money,” McKinney said.
“Ridership is tremendously heavy.”
For the past six years, PART, along with Triad Air Awareness, has been sponsoring the Triad Commute Challenge.
“The Triad Commute Challenge is a push where we get out and about in the community to try to get folks to do something different other than drive alone,” said Chantale Wesley, the project manager for the Challenge.
“We’re promoting carpooling, riding the bus, vanpooling or working from home,” Wesley said.