A little less than a year ago, The Barrel did an unscientific, utterly antecdotal survey of whether high gasoline prices had cut demand. We wrote about it here.
A drive in Colorado the other day provided another great opportunity to see just how much high gasoline prices had slowed the pace of traffic. The US Energy Information Administration's most recent average for conventional gasoline -- Colorado is a conventional state -- is $3.61/gal. A little less than a year ago, when we conducted our first "experiment," the average conventional price was about $3.25, and the national hysteria level has risen at a far greater pace than the 11% increase between those two numbers. It seems to have grown exponentially.
Certainly, that sort of economic pressure means that people would do the easy, fuel-efficient thing and slow down, just a bit, to help their fuel efficiency. Right?
The road for our experiment was the tollway that runs from the area near Denver International Airport up to the region just south of Boulder, Colorado. Traffic was light and it was a beautiful day. There were no congestion-related slowdowns.
We held the speed to about 65 miles per hour, on a road that carries a 70 mph limit. The road was wide open and it was often a challenge to find the discipline to maintain that speed; ramping it higher would have been easy to do.
And just like last year, every single car passed us along a roughly 20-mile journey. Near the end of our trip, The Barrel noticed a very large SUV in the rear view mirror that didn't seem to be gaining. Maybe this fuel-conscious consumer, concerned about increasing his fuel efficiency, would lighten up on the pedal and stay behind us.
No such luck. After a few minutes, he passed us also. Over the course of this trip, we passed nobody.
Now, the two experiments are not the same. The Colorado road is a toll road, so maybe the people driving it have more money to begin with and don't care about burning a few more dollars of oil. They might be more than willing to pay whatever fee is necessary to get where they are going faster. And we were at a bit less than the speed limit for most of the time.
There's no doubt that lower income Americans are hurting as a result of high fuel prices. Somebody already on a tight budget has now seen that budget hemorragh red ink that can't easily be stopped.
For the drivers on the tollway in Denver, sweeping down from the Flatirons toward the plains east of Denver....well, it didn't seem to make a difference. Once again.
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