“It’s just another example of the high cost of gas that isn’t going to go away soon,” he said.

The CVS Samaritan Van Program, which provides free roadside assistance in nine Midwest and East Coast cities, has seen a 30 percent to 40 percent increase in stops to help people who have run out of gas just in the last two months, said Mike DeAngelis, a spokesman for CVS Pharmacy, which operates the program as a community charity.

The AAA Northern California regional office, which covers Utah and Nevada in addition to Northern California, has seen a 3 percent increase in out-of-gas calls in the first five months of this year, said a spokesman, Michael Geeser.

But it saw even larger increases in some months when gas prices shot up quickly, like April, when such calls rose 6.5 percent compared with April 2007.

“People are just trying to squeeze the most they can out of a gallon,” Mr. Geeser said.

There are some areas, like Chicago, that have not seen a spike in roadside service calls from drivers with dry tanks, but roadside assistance agencies said the calls had increased so sharply coast-to-coast that they started monitoring closely for repeat callers.

David Castillo, supervisor of the Dallas County Courtesy Patrol, a county-run agency in Texas that uses 10 pickups to aid stranded motorists, said, “Of course you get the people who try to scam us out of gas, so we always ask them now to try to start it first, and, of course, it starts right up with some of them.” Over the last six months, Courtesy drivers who had been using about three gallons a day to help stranded motorists now use as much as 10 gallons a day.