High Gas Prices Drive Down Traffic Fatalities
August 25, 2008
You may have noticed gas prices coming down all on their own without the help of congress. Don’t be fooled. Nothig has been solved. This is the natural effect of high gas prices causing people to drive less, thus increasing the supply that’s on hand and, in return, lowering the price per gallon.
Here is a related story from the AP – Joan Lowery [clueless] about a side benefit of high gas prices. She’s trying to put the spin on that high gas prices are good because they lower the number of highway fatalities.
Roll back the clock to 1961: John F. Kennedy was inaugurated president. The Peace Corps was founded. The Dow Jones industrials hit 734. Gasoline reached 31 cents a gallon.
And the number of people killed in U.S. traffic accidents that year topped 36,200.
This year, gasoline climbed over $4 a gallon, and the traffic death toll — according to one study — appears headed to the lowest levels since Kennedy moved into the White House.
The number is being pulled down by a change in Americans’ driving habits, which is fueled largely by record high gasoline prices, according to the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan.
The institute’s study — which covers 12 months ending in April — found that as gas prices rose, driving and fatalities declined. The surprise, said Professor Michael Sivak, author of the study, was the huge decline in fatalities in March and April as gasoline prices surged above $3.20 a gallon.
Over the previous 10 months, monthly fatalities declined an average of 4.2 percent compared to the previous year. Then, Sivak’s data shows, fatalities dropped 22.1 percent in March and 17.9 percent in April of this year — numbers that did not show up in a recent federal report that tracked a drop in traffic deaths through the end of 2007.
The declines found by Sivak suggest that motorists reached what he calls a “tipping point” and have begun significantly changing their behavior — altering not only how much they drive, but where, when and how they drive. Sivak said early data for May and June show similar trends.
“There is something more than just the reduction in driving that has to be brought in as an explanation for the huge drop in fatalities,” Sivak said.
If the pattern continues for the rest of this year, it would lead to “an unheard of improvement” in motor vehicle fatalities, said Sivak, who used data from the National Safety Council, National Center for Health Statistics and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
So why not start charging us $10 a gallon? We’d all be that much safer. Of course, we wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere, but what the heck? Read the rest of this inane story here.
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