A Silver Lining

A silver lining on the otherwise gloomy economic cloud – As of December 22, gas prices in Massachusetts (adjusted for inflation) are at their lowest level since April 2002.

Source: Energy Information Administration, weekly retail gasoline prices. Inflation adjustment based on Northeast regional Consumer Price Index time series from BLS.

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Gas Prices Creating Major Changes in Travel Behavior

Today the Federal Highway Administration released their monthly traffic volume trends report for May 2008, and the data show a trend that is significant, although not surprising.

• Nationally, travel on all roads declined by 3.7% for May 2008 as compared with May 2007. This marks the 7th consecutive monthly decline in this metric.
• On a moving 12-month basis, total traffic volume fell by 10 billion miles, to 2.966 trillion miles. This is the lowest level in 3.5 years – since January of 2005 - and this metric has also declined in each of the last 7 months (the chart shows traffic volume from 1983 to 2008 – click to enlarge). 

There has never been a trend remotely like this. The current, ongoing 7-month decline represents the most significant adjustment to driving behavior in the last 25 years, if not longer. And these data are only through May…gas prices continued to rise through June and into July…the trend will continue.

Local Addendum: Traffic volume in the Northeast declined by 4.2% for May 2008 as compared with May 2007. Meanwhile, the MBTA announced that average weekday ridership in May was about 5.3% higher than during May 2007. It was the fifth monthly increase in a row. And…average weekday bus ridership crested over 400,000, which is only the fifth time in the past 101 months it had reached that level.

Decreasing traffic volume and increasing public transportation ridership are two sides of the same coin.

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A Global Perspective on Some of the Important Things

Broadening our perspective on some of the important things in life - like the state of humanity, gas, and of course, beer:

• The World Clock - Check out the World Clock (click link or picture) to see active running statistics on population, deaths, illnesses, energy use, environment, food, crimes, and more. If you click on “Day,” “Week,” or “Year” it shows running totals for that period, if you click “Now” it will reset the counters to zero.

• The Price of Gas – I gathered data on the price of gas in 28 countries as of early June. Guess which country still has the cheapest gas of all? Four bucks a gallon really sucks, I’m just saying, it’s a lot worse pretty much everywhere else.

•  The Price of a Pint – The price of beer in 204 countries (click link or picture).

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