121–130 of 153 posts
I wonder if the CSV is supposed to list all petrol stations, as currently it only has 4 with city==Edinburgh. Edit: after asking AI about this I would say the CSV is pretty useless as a comprehensive source of info on UK fuel prices.
Seriously?
I thought HN readers would have more sense than that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In France we had such api available for decades, many apps are using it and there are a lot of people using them. I don't know if your experience is from British people but it looks like they just didn't have the mean to effectively compare fuel prices. Once they do, there is a significant part of the British drivers that will most likely be using it.
This is exactly it. We have a system here in Western Australia and people use it a lot: fuelwatch.wa.gov.au I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience. But since moving to WA I've found that it's really easy to have a quick look when I notice I need to fill up, then I can head to the cheapest station nearby, and the difference can be in the range of…
We've had it for years (as noted in other comments there's a few different people like the RAC, AA and Petrolprices.com all maintaining their own lists - a quick check of my email has messages from the latter going back to 2011). The new part is that this is from the government and the data is freely accessible (Petrolprices in particular covered their pages in ads, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't a way to exchange money for the data).
The context to this is that, especially since the pandemic, there's been a complaint with the Competition and Markets Authority that the petrol stations were quick to raise prices, slow to lower them, and weren't competing with each other[1]:
> The CMA found that retail prices tended to "rise like a rocket, but fall like a feather" in response to increases or decreases in the cost of crude oil.
Independent petrol stations have virtually disappeared and you don't have to look too hard to see that in an area they tend to all raise or lower their prices in virtual lockstep. Gathering this data would make the case significantly easier if the next step were that some of the petrol station operators had to be broken up to encourage more competition.
1: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp80dpzdg37o#comments
Edit: Petrolprices was founded in 2005 (!) [2]
Decisions about fuel purchases are often irrational, much like many food purchases or generic medicines. I know someone who avoids their local petrol station that is 10p/litre cheaper than most others nearby (within a mile or so) as they think the cheaper fuel must be lower quality. There are weird status things going on with purchases like this. Only the other day my father refused to buy some branded paracetamol be…
>> I know someone who avoids their local petrol station that is 10p/litre cheaper than most others nearby (within a mile or so) as they think the cheaper fuel must be lower quality - "Top Tier gas contains higher detergent levels to prevent engine carbon" - "Major brands use specific additives that enhance performance, while "no-name" or discount stations might only meet the minimum EPA-required detergent levels" - "…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In France we had such api available for decades, many apps are using it and there are a lot of people using them. I don't know if your experience is from British people but it looks like they just didn't have the mean to effectively compare fuel prices. Once they do, there is a significant part of the British drivers that will most likely be using it.
This is exactly it. We have a system here in Western Australia and people use it a lot: fuelwatch.wa.gov.au I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience. But since moving to WA I've found that it's really easy to have a quick look when I notice I need to fill up, then I can head to the cheapest station nearby, and the difference can be in the range of…
Disagree - drivers maintain a mental map of local stations and know roughly how expensive they are, and make a decision based on that. Obviously this API will help inform us better!
This is neat, great use of public data, and just in time for the ICE phaseout starting within a decade.
More unnecessary meddling, this causes price convergence so anyone living close to a typically lower cost source of fuel is going to have an almost imperceptible increase in relative cost. They certainly love spending taxpayer money on nothing don't they.
> this causes price convergence aka competition
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly it. We have a system here in Western Australia and people use it a lot: fuelwatch.wa.gov.au I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience. But since moving to WA I've found that it's really easy to have a quick look when I notice I need to fill up, then I can head to the cheapest station nearby, and the difference can be in the range of…
> I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience. We've had it for years (as noted in other comments there's a few different people like the RAC, AA and Petrolprices.com all maintaining their own lists - a quick check of my email has messages from the latter going back to 2011). The new part is that this is from the government and the data is freely acc…
Petrolprices.com (for example) seems to have been built on user-reported data rather than petrol-station reported data, and it's easy to find fairly recent criticisms of the whole thing being inaccurate. And an inaccurate comparison site is fairly useless IMHO.
I lived in the UK until 2021 and I must admit I'd never heard of them. Whereas here in WA everyone uses fuelprices. There are probably other factors involved here as well, as we have a weird weekly or biweekly price cycle (though I think this has ended somewhat in the last two years) where every second Tuesday fuel was dirt cheap as they were trying to clear down the tanks ahead of the next delivery.
Is the 'new part' not that the vendors are being forced to actually publish comparison data rather than rely on third parties to gather it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly it. We have a system here in Western Australia and people use it a lot: fuelwatch.wa.gov.au I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience. But since moving to WA I've found that it's really easy to have a quick look when I notice I need to fill up, then I can head to the cheapest station nearby, and the difference can be in the range of…
>the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience Disagree - drivers maintain a mental map of local stations and know roughly how expensive they are, and make a decision based on that. Obviously this API will help inform us better!
Maybe it's me that's weird. No, surely that can't be right... :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> I know someone who avoids their local petrol station that is 10p/litre cheaper than most others nearby (within a mile or so) as they think the cheaper fuel must be lower quality - "Top Tier gas contains higher detergent levels to prevent engine carbon" - "Major brands use specific additives that enhance performance, while "no-name" or discount stations might only meet the minimum EPA-required detergent levels" - "…
These things are not true in the UK - all fuel is held to the same high standard, though premium variants are available too.
ie you're asserting there is zero variance in quality?
OP wrote lower quality, not low quality
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In France we had such api available for decades, many apps are using it and there are a lot of people using them. I don't know if your experience is from British people but it looks like they just didn't have the mean to effectively compare fuel prices. Once they do, there is a significant part of the British drivers that will most likely be using it.
Yes but the real feature that makes it viable, is that petrol station in France can change price only once a day. I forgot how it works in the UK, but in Germany they change wildly depending on the hour in the day. For example they show low price in the morning, so that workers who are late for work notice it and fill on the way back, only to find a price 10-20cents higher at 17h.
> Since 31 August 2013 companies which operate public petrol stations or have the power to set their prices are required to report price changes for the most commonly used types of fuel, i.e. Super E5, Super E10 and Diesel “in real time” to the Market Transparency Unit for Fuels. This then passes on the incoming price data to consumer information service providers, which in turn pass it on to the consumer.
As a consumer, there is no direct API by the MTS-K that you can use, but there are some services like Tankerkoenig which pass this data on to you. I have used their API in Home Assistant before I switched to an EV.
https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/EN/Tasks/markettransparencyu...