Topic Hubs : Global warming : Discussions

Do high fuel prices influence car use?

I was wondering at what price the average person would start to consider leaving their car at home. My best bet is $8 per gallon.

Posted Wednesday June 13, 3:58 PM

Lee Byron says:

Good question, I bet it depends a lot on their geographic location. The threshold would probably be a lot lower in bigger cities where things are close together and public transit is an option.

A lot of places, like the Midwest, have no public transit and are pretty spread out. It's going to take a really expensive gallon to get of those people to bike 40 miles to work!

Posted Wednesday June 13, 4:04 PM

Frank van Ham says:

Check out this visualization that shows the relation between Average income and gas prices.

Posted Wednesday June 13, 4:08 PM

Anonymous says:

I don't think the question is posed well because it's a sliding scale. Prices are already high enough to curtail what we call "let just go take a look" kind of driving which we did six months ago. We've also been smarter about delaying routine trips like shopping so that we can get more in one trip versus many.

However the next major cut would involve things you want to do. Unfortunately for us that would take a very high gas price, probably at least $10/gallon if not $15 before we might consider not doing something we want due to high prices. Even then in many cases we would probably do it anyway.

Making this post makes me realize that if the government wants to do something the key is to be able to aim for people that are held hostage to high energy prices. People who commute, truck drivers, and so on. For people that use energy for discretionary purposes a price of $10-15/gallon may not be unreasonable. But for commuters or truckers they may only survive on sub-$5/gallon gas. From what I understand this is how emerging economies like China have done it.

Kris Tuttle (IBM needs a simpler way for people to register to comment on blogs, ever hear of Wordpress? :-)

Posted Wednesday July 09, 2:24 PM

Anonymous says:

@frank - some interesting studies in this area. in general, it's HARD to study long-term elasticity of travel. ... on long timeframes people make tradeoffs about where they live, which car to buy, and whether to learn how to take transit.

Short-term elasticity is very easy to study, but maybe not as useful. In the US, the elasticity at 2000's levels was that you had to double gas prices to get a 7% change in behavior (. As the commenter above stated, this average disguises larger differences across market segments. http://www.carbontax.org/blogarchives/2007/06/22/who-is-daniel-sperling-and-why-is-he-saying-bad-things-about-carbon-taxes/

@kris ... actually, I like the disqus system better than wordpress
Long-term subsidies are not a good way to work. They DO do it in china, but this is generally regarded as a bad thing; if chinese companies make investment decisions, they have to bet whether the policy will still be in effect in 10 years... and therefore overall everybody has to do some hedging. China does it because they see a national interest in stimulating growth. Also do temporary fuel subsidies to delay effects of now-expensive transport.

Darius Roberts

Posted Saturday July 12, 6:21 AM

Anonymous says:

the goverment should start funding more money into alternate fuels like water ,wind etc... And close down the coal plants of America(producec the most C02 in the world) and Canada.just my thought.

Posted Saturday July 19, 8:39 PM

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Do high fuel prices influence car use?

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