Traffic data company Inrix has a new report out exploring the relationship between fuel prices and congestion. Not surprisingly, they found that “increases in gas prices in the first half of 2008 significantly impacted consumer behavior, resulting in strong correlations with reduced traffic congestion on a nationwide basis.”

Perhaps a bit more unexpected, however, is that this relationship was much stronger in certain metro areas, and seemed to barely affect others. And so places like Las Vegas and Orlando had a relatively big correlation between TTI (”travel time index”) and fuel price, while others, like NYC, barely had any. INRIX speculates this may have to do with the fact that more discretionary driving is typically done in those sorts of places (e.g., people on vacation), and that that would be the first thing to go, and further notes that “he largest decrease in congestion is at those times that are most impacted by vacation driving, specifically Friday PM, not Monday AM.”

One wonders what other factors might be lurking in there; e.g., the subprime crisis seemed to particularly hit areas that were particularly dependent on long car commutes; as Business Week has noted, “the subprime crisis was most pronounced in places where poorer people could afford to buy—largely in the distant suburbs where land was cheap and builders were active”; I imagine that was going on more in Las Vegas and Orlando than NYC.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 9:40 am and is filed under Cars, Cities, Congestion, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.