Gasoline at $4 per gallon did wonders for promoting bikes as a lean and green solution.

The price of oil has dropped 55% since July. Local gas prices are “falling like leaves.”  Daylight is getting more scarce and the temperatures are dropping.   All these factors might mean more bike commuters will be hopping back into their cars.

We could speculate on this, but the results will come out soon enough.

The August report from the Federal Highway Administration was recently released.  In summary, vehicle travel dropped 5.6% in August (a 15 billion mile decrease.)  The culmulative vehicle miles for 2008 are down 3.3% or 67.2 billion miles.

Those decreases aren’t all attributable to more bike commuters.

According to a special report from Inrix, “While consumers react to the high costs of fuel by decreasing all driving, the most significant impact to consumers is the reduction of discretionary driving.”

Even so, the report’s survey found that higher gas prices caused 8% of the respondents to bike (and use scooters) more.  That compares well with increases in car pooling (9%) and public transit (7%).

Inrix also predicts that the drop in gas prices will not lead to significant increases in driving due to the weak economy.   Perhaps the interest in bike will continue

Tags: commuting, Trends

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under General bike news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.