Petrol: the long, slow decline
An interesting graph came up on the TransportBlog twitter feed a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal: Pretty self-explanatory, but what you’re seeing is that gasoline (or petrol) consumption in the US grew until the mid-2000s, and has since fallen.…
20 Comments Petrol use falling
Even petrol companies are now talking about how fuel use and driving are falling. The Herald reports:
Z Energy says petrol consumption is falling in relation to increasing availability of broadband.
While more fuel-efficient vehicles and rising petrol prices have also contributed to consumption falling from its 2007 peak, Z’s chief executive, Mike Bennetts, said demand was more sensitive to broadband connectivity than these traditional factors.…
High fuel prices mean we are travelling less
OK, I admit I haven’t come up with the catchiest title for this post, but it’s a good TL;DR. As I’ve written previously, world oil prices were pretty dang low for 20-odd years: from the mid-80s to the mid-2000s. The price of a litre of petrol in New Zealand reached its lowest point in 1999, and started to rise from then on – with major rises in the last decade.…
We’re spending much more on fuel
Most people who drive will likely have noticed that the price of petrol in recent years has not exactly been as friendly on the wallet as it was a decade or so ago. In fact other than a three week stint in July last year where it only just dipped under, the average weekly price of regular 91 hasn’t been below $2 per litre since February 2011.…
“Real” gasoline prices in the US have never been higher *
* subject to various caveats below!
I’ve just been looking at some inflation data for the USA, and I was a little surprised to see that, in real (inflation-adjusted) terms, gasoline prices reached an all-time high last year. Higher than the oil shock days of the’70s – early ’80s, in fact. I checked this against some other sources, and it seems to stack up – the Energy Information Administration and some other chap reached the same conclusion (although the other guy reckons they were higher in 1918 – my data doesn’t go back that far).…
What would happen to Petrol if….?
Over the recent week, the price of petrol has moved up close to its all-time record high, in nominal terms, and is sitting at around $2.20 per litre. Yet at the same time the New Zealand dollar is also close to an all-time high vs.…
NZ Petrol Prices
I have added two more graphs to our transport stats collection showing the change in petrol prices over time. The data for both comes from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment from their weekly, quarterly numbers. The quarterly numbers include the inflation adjusted figures which is very handy for comparing them over a long period of time and shows that in real terms, we still haven’t reached the peaks of the 80’s yet.…
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