COLUMBUS – Expect plenty of company from fellow travelers this Labor Day weekend as Ohioans trying to hold on to the last vestiges of summer take advantage of low gas prices and hit the road
READ MORE: In The Columbus Dispatch
The AAA Auto Club predicts that 1.5 million Ohioans will be among the 35.3 million people jamming highways and slowing security lines at airports as they take trips that are at least 50 miles from home this weekend. That’s the highest number of people expected to travel during the holiday weekend since 2008.
“A lot of people are staying within Ohio,” Kimberly Schwind, spokeswoman for AAA Ohio, told the Columbus Dispatch. “It seems for a long weekend that 4-to-6 hour range, if you’re going to drive, is what we’re going to see.”
Schwind said that in some cases people are taking longer trips, with spending on trips up by 40 percent, though most will drive to their destinations.
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Higher travel volumes are expected even as people come to grips with a stock-market downturn that has left retirement accounts and other investments ailing and gas prices subsiding after an August spike.
Most U.S. drivers will be paying the lowest gas prices for Labor Day weekend since 2004 (see graph), said AAA public relations manager Michael Green.
About 88 percent of Ohio travelers will drive to their weekend destinations between now and Monday, up slightly over the national average. Gas prices have stabilized after a mid-August spike to about $3 a gallon because of refinery problems in Whiting, Ind.
The average retail price of regular gasoline in central Ohio Friday morning was $2.19, down 12 cents since Monday and 31 cents cheaper than a week before, according to a daily survey by the AAA, the Oil Price Information Service and WEX, Inc. Drivers could find several stations on the West Side and in Hilliard and Grove City selling for under $2 a gallon.
Ohio boasted the lowest prices of any of its surrounding states where drivers were paying anywhere from $2.30 in Kentucky to $2.49 in Pennsylvania, compared with Ohio’s statewide average price of $2.24.
Last year, the average price for a gallon of regular gas in Ohio was $3.49 during Labor Day weekend, Schwind said.