Estimating demand is always tricky. In the US, the one barometer that many people swear by are figures on how much in gasoline excise taxes were collected by the federal government. The problem is that there is a significant lag in that data, so it's not particularly timely. But the theory is that every gallon of gasoline purchased must pay that federal tax, so it is an extremely accurate picture of demand.
Such information is particularly relevant now, since there has been a long-running debate everywhere in the world, but particularly in the US, whether higher oil prices and the resultant rise in gasoline prices is reducing demand.
More timely yet less direct numbers are available from the US Department of Transportation. Its most recent report, just released, is from April. The data is compiled using traffic count technology, so it doesn’t measure whether an individual car was on a 2-mile trip or a 20-mile trip, a difference that would be measured by excise tax figures.
In its latest report, the DOT is reporting that on a year-to-year basis, April 2007 travel was down 0.4% compared to April 2006, and that cumulative travel for the first four months of 2007 was down 0.7% from the first four months of 2006. Clearly, this is evidence that high gasoline prices are having an impact on demand, given that one can hardly argue that such a decline would be the result of a weak economy.
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