Total driving on highways in the US was down 3.7% for the month of May compared with May 2007, with gas prices up 25%. The experts say that demand for gas in the short term is relatively inelastic because it is affected by long-term decisions such as what kind of car to buy and where to move, and so we won't see demand really fall off for a while yet.
PS: On a side note, I would like to take this news item as a case study of the suckiness of traditional newspaper writing in the age of the internet. First read this Reuters piece, then read this blog entry by CBS guy Kevin Drum. The first, you will notice, is terrible. Why it's terrible:
- Even though it's short, it's bloated with all these vapid quotes from the Secretary of Transportation.
- The first sentence tries to jam too much information in and ends up leaving out a critical piece of information: driving is down 3.7% compared to what? Compared to the previous month? Compared to the same month last year? I had to look elsewhere for the information.
- The author insists on expressing increases and decreases in the meaningless absolute terms of millions of total miles driven. Nobody has an intuitive grasp of these figures--so why not stick with percentages?
- There are no links to the source material.
- There are no charts or graphs.
