Most traffic models and transportation plans assume people’s travel behavior is largely predictable and unchanging. Usually, this means more and more driving year after year, and investments aimed at meeting that rising demand. But the most recent spike in gas prices shows just how quickly people adapt their behavior to even small price cues.
fuel prices
Gas prices can have ripple effects on development patterns and travel options
Gasoline prices have clear impacts on development patterns, according to recent research that adds new evidence for the long-term impacts of transportation pricing signals. The new study shows that wage growth and low gas prices contributed to high rates of suburban growth in the 1980s and 1990s, measured in terms of deforestation. Those trends have reversed as gas prices have risen.
Is declining car use a long-term trend or just a short-term reaction to the recession?
In ‘Peak Car Use’: Understanding the Demise of Automobile Dependence, published last month in World Transport Policy and Practice, Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy, of the Curtin University Sustainability Policy (CUSP) Institute in Australia, summarize …