> So I built a scraper that hits the UK government's mandatory Fuel Finder API every 10 minutes and stores every price change. 90k records across 7,700 stations since January.
Only 1 change per station per week on average? Fewer than I expected. Not sure I'd call it a scraper, myself.
157p/L national average is about 8 USD/G.
> Only 1 change per station per week on average? Fewer than I expected.
My uneducated guess is it correlates to the weekly delivery of fuel. ;-)
> 157p/L national average is about 8 USD/G.
Europeans seem to be far more comfortable with Pigovian taxes than Americans. Or does it even come up for discussion when people are referencing the retail price at the pump?
It definitely does come up. A common complaint in the UK is that there are two types of tax added to fuel prices; fuel duty and VAT. So you end up paying VAT on the fuel duty you’re paying.
We have had fuel price protests too, sometimes involving blockades by hauliers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_protests_in_the_United_Ki...
fair point on scraper, it's more of an ingest pipeline really. the 90k is total price records across 7,700 stations since january, stations update a few times a week on average. the 10 min polling catches every move when it happens. the value is in the per-station, history over time, not the raw volume.