On Tuesday, the United States launched a trade war against its three biggest trading partners and financial markets around the world shuddered, but Long Island’s average gasoline price barely nudged from $3.03 per gallon.

That price is nearly the lowest it’s been since Thanksgiving and well off the average at this time last year, according to AAA. Some experts said prices would likely fall in coming months but warned that cheap gas would be cold comfort if tariffs slow the economy.

Still, the price of gas factors hugely in consumer sentiment, and AAA spokesman Robert Sinclair Jr. called the $3 price point the "benchmark" around which many American motorists adjust their behavior: taking more trips when prices are cheaper and curtailing their driving when they’re more expensive.

Many factors will determine gas prices in coming months. Canada is one of the tariff targets, along with Mexico and China, and it is a significant trading partner for oil and petroleum products. In 2023, the U.S. imported $108 billion worth of those products from Canada. Over the next week, higher taxes on those goods might raise gasoline prices significantly in the Midwest and New England, because those areas rely more heavily on Canadian product than the rest of the U.S., said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.

 Any near-term price increase, experts said, will be much milder on Long Island, which is closer to Gulf pipelines and regional refineries. Any near-term price increase in the New York metro area would be no more than a nickel per gallon, De Haan said. 

But over time, De Haan wrote in a blog post, political actions like tariffs "almost always result in higher costs for everyday Americans. The real-world impact of tariffs won’t be to shift refining patterns, instead it will be to add costs throughout the system, and these costs will make their way to consumers in the form of higher prices for gasoline, diesel, and other petroleum products starting today."

There are also seasonal price shifts, increases that accompany planned refinery maintenance and the switch in supply that takes place each year in the Northeast from the winter formulation of gasoline to the more expensive summer formulation. That transition typically adds about 25 to 50 cents to the cost per gallon, said Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at OPIS, a data and analytics company.

But that seasonal increase will face multiple offsetting factors this year. They include strong production from the U.S. and foreign suppliers like the OPEC nations, which on Monday announced that significant production increases would start in April, along with the possibility of rapprochement between the West and Russia, a major supplier. There is also, Kloza said, the possibility that a global trade war will lead to decreased demand for fuel, driving down prices.

"There is a prospect of universal tariffs globally that pretty much every economist other than those who work the White House says is going to slow down global GDP growth," he said. "That sets up a cheap year for a lot of people, but it’s not desirable."

Sinclair, from AAA, said that In the next few weeks prices on Long Island could continue to dip as suppliers look to purge their distribution systems of winter blends. They will rise eventually, but "lower demand is largely responsible for lower prices" in the United States today.

"It’s still a difficult economy for a lot of Americans, and despite prices being significantly cheaper, they’re still not cheap enough for a lot of Americans to engage in what’d I’d call nonessential driving," he said.