Gasoline and oil prices surged to new highs today, and experts say they believe they will go higher in the coming months.

Oil reached a record $111 a barrel today before falling back to $110.33. The inflation-adjusted record, reached in 1980, had been $103.77 until the recent surge.

Also today, regular unleaded gasoline hit a record national average of $3.27 a gallon. The comparable averages were $3.20 a gallon in Philadelphia and $3.01 in South Jersey, to the consternation of many drivers.

One was Virginia O'Boyle, who commutes four hours every day - nearly 200 miles total - from her home near the Jersey Shore to Wilmington.

"The gas prices are horrendous," O'Boyle said from her job as AAA's head of travel administration. "I think they're going to get worse."

O'Boyle eases her commute by driving 55 miles to Cherry Hill and then hopping a van full of coworkers for an additional 43 miles to work.

"It's like a godsend, not only for the gas, but for my sanity," she said of the rideshare.

All over the region, people seemed to be grousing about the spiking gasoline prices and adopting strategies to outwit them.

Joe Grasso, a Philadelphia contractor, today was putting a small amount of expensive gasoline from a city station into his Dodge Ram 1500 so he could fill up later with cheaper fuel near his jobs in Wayne and Lansdale.

Michael Albuck, a Roto Rooter man from the Northeast, relies on Web sites to find the cheapest stations, which often involves extra driving.

And Tony Pileggi of Richboro, a superintendent for a Philadelphia masonry firm, was busy pumping Jersey gas and diesel at a Hess station in Camden, because it was cheaper than having it delivered to a nearby worksite.

Many people expressed anger over the prices. Bob Marinelli, of Springfield, Delaware County, had just filled his Ford F-150 truck, costing his company $113. "That's the highest I've ever seen," said Marinelli, who is director of facilities management for the Northeast Treatment Center in Philadelphia. "It's a joke."

Oil analyst Stephen Schork, whose Villanova-based newsletter analyzes oil prices, did not dispute that characterization. The market "has just become decoupled from reality," he said. Supplies are high, demand is low, and the U.S. appears headed for a recession. Those factors usually mean lower prices.

"This is a market run amok," Schork said. "Eventually, it will crash."

Shawkat Hammoudeh, professor of economics and international business at Drexel University, noted that oil was valued in dollars. And the falling U.S. dollar was causing investors and producers to drive up oil prices to compensate for their losses. "As long the dollar doesn't reach a bottom," he said, "crude prices don't have a cap."

Cathy Rossi, spokesman for AAA's regional office in Wilmington, echoed the views of some analysts who said gasoline could rise as high as $3.80 a gallon this summer.

Polls and studies show that at $3.50 a gallon, drivers will start changing their behavior, she said, adding, "We are probably going to break that threshold."

Tammy Ford, project manager for DARTS RideShare Delaware, said more people were looking to find riding partners. But "there's no panic yet," she said. "People are not registering en masse."

So the plight of the long-distance commuter continues. They are the proud, the lonely, and the gas-hungry.

Mark Mistysyn, director of the Web center for Main Line Health, commutes 106 miles round-trip every day from Macungie near Allentown to Bryn Mawr Hospital.

"It hits me right in the wallet. The only thing I can do about it is grin and bear it," said Mistysyn, who drives a relatively economical 2003 VW Passat 1.8 Turbo. "I can't stop driving. . . . I have to close my eyes and let my credit card do the work."