Reports Sky News.
The whole thing is an absolutely fascinating example of irrational human behavior. Being a natural born trouble maker with a bit of spare time, I queued twice over the weekend to unnecessarily fill up two of my cars - I would have done the third one but I noticed the MOT had expired (it's gone in today). It made me all nostalgic for the 1970s or East Germany.
There is a whole branch of applied maths for Queueing Theory, and no doubt they'll be analysing the heck of out this for years to come.
I always assumed that it would sort itself out within a week or so. On average (say), motorists fill up every two weeks, a petrol station can handle three times its normal volume and everybody bunches and fills their cars over a five day period (14 ÷ 3, rounded). Then theoretically for the next eleven days, very few people need to or will bother filling up at all.
Except heavy users... and people who are would rather fill up again even if the tank is three-quarters full, which are unknown unknowns. But the effect of the latter will be minor - while people just topping up spend much the same amount of time in the queue, at the pump, faffing about in their cars before driving off (what the heck are they doing?) and manoeuvring their way back into the traffic they are only buying smaller amounts of fuel per visit, so total fuel sold per petrol station per day is the same (more customers x smaller volumes).
Maybe we will reach a steady state where everybody tops up a quarter tank every three or four days, which is the same amount of fuel purchased, just more time in longer queues? Which will dwindle to every week, and hence to every fortnight again.
I don't know how this will pan out, but it is very interesting.
Debate Magazine
