The regulatory and environmental hurdles as well as having to make a special fuel just for the California market has caused most manufacturers to leave the state. Fewer manufacturers and high taxes makes the fuel expensive. I've seen as high as $9.00/USg in San Francisco.
Slightly off-topic gas price discussion. tl:dr = the air quality in California has improved immensely because of our emission standards. At what point is the juice worth the squeeze?
I grew up in the San Fernando Valley (within the Los Angeles City limits. If you'd like to know what it was like, it was pretty much just like Fast Times at Ridgemont High- I was that age and doing many of those things in many of the places at the time that was filmed- it's kinda biopic.) But what that movie doesn't show was that for a good portion of the summer you couldn't see the mountains 3 miles away because of the pollution. Your eyes would burn from the ozone and I'm not kidding, we would do phys. ed. inside on some of the smoggiest days (was all knew it didn't matter- but somewhere there was a policy wonk who didn't understand science.)
1990 was the year of my escape. I haven't lived there since, but in the recent past had been spending an ever greater amount of time returning home for weeks at a time, on a monthly basis for several years to care for my elderly parents. Population density is up. Traffic is up. Insanity is up. Air pollution is down. On a super anecdotal level level, I'd say 90% of the summer days are 90% better air quality. Sure, there are inversion layers and other weird weather phenomena, but the difference is a stark improvement from 40 years ago.
We can discuss the finer details of gas formulae, taxes, smog checks (the colloquial name for emissions testing requirements) and all of California Air Resources Board, Bay Area Air Quality Management District and South Coast Air Quality Management District if you'd like, because I also have my grievances... but the proof is in the pudding.
The big question is; "is the reduction in pollution worth the money we pay?"
My next one would be "at what point are we paying more for diminishing returns?" As they say,
perfect is the enemy of good.
Here's what we pay in taxes on
gasoline:
State Excise tax: 61.2 cents/gal (16.2 c/l)
Federal Excise tax: 18.4 cents/gal (4.9 c/l)
Cap and Trade: "about 25" cents/gal (6.7 c/l)
Sales Tax: 2.25% plus local taxes (10.25% in my little city)
Underground storage tank cleanup fee: "about 2" cents/gal. (0.5 c/l)
Edit:
Just for fun... A gallon of 91 octane costs $6.79 locally. Before taxes and fees (sales tax would be 64 c/gallon) it's $5.09-ish.
