Are gasoline prices as low as they feel?

Is the price of gasoline really low or does it just feel that way?

In parts of the Twin Cities area, it’s not hard to find regular unleaded for $1.97, which feels almost like the days when gas stations gave away a free set of steak knives with a fill-up.

But they’re not really that low — at least not as low as they feel — or so the Wall St. Journal  claims today.

In 2012, the national annual average for a gallon of regular unleaded gas—the yardstick for gauging prices—hit a high of $3.77, capping a series of years in which the average exceeded $3 a gallon. Before that, the last time the average was so high was in the early 1980s when, adjusted for inflation, it topped $3.60.

That’s why today’s prices feel so affordable. On New Year’s Day, the national daily average was $2.23 a gallon, according to Gas Buddy, a website that publishes real-time prices, and in many places the cost was substantially lower. Nearly 30% of the 130,000 vendors tracked by Gas Buddy across the country, or about 38,200 stations, were selling gas for less than $2 a gallon.

But the lowest prices today don’t match the bottom-of-the-barrel prices of the past 40 years and it isn’t likely the current prices will stay low as long.

Actually, they do, however. The inflation-adjusted price for the $1.19-a-gallon gasoline in 1990 is $2.15 in today’s dollars.

In fact, on this date in 1994, the average price of gasoline was $.99, the last time the average price would be that low. That’s $1.58 in today’s dollars. For more than half the decade gasoline hovered between $1.04 and $1.10 ($1.66 today), according to the Energy Information Agency. It dropped to $.88 at this time in 1999 ($1.26 today), but that was pretty much a fluke.

Consider this charge from inflation.com.

Now how low do the current prices feel?

Related: As gas prices keep changing, Americans keep adjusting to the wild price swings (The Kansas City Star).

Why oil prices keep falling — and throwing the world into turmoil (Vox).