Friday, March 5, 2010

What’s your plan for $5/gallon gas?


Here are some beautiful maps of why you, personally, should care. These maps show what percent of the average household income is going towards transportation. All those people who live in the pink areas are spending between 20-28% of their income on transportation! and
those dark red areas are where people are spending MORE than 28% of their income!!!!!

Here is what it looks like when gas is $1.63/gallon, as it was in 2000.

And here is what it looks like when gas was $4.18/gallon, as it was in 2008.


Yikes! and wow! and @#$!@#@#$!!!!
Note that households that are car dependent really take a huge hit. The people who are living in areas with high quality transit are doing well. So, back to the question at hand:

If you are a family, what’s your plan for $5/gallon gas?

If you are a town, what’s your plan?

If you are a state, what’s your plan?

If you are the country, what’s your plan?

You can look at these maps for many metro-areas across the US at htaindex.org, and also see what this looks like when the average cost of housing is added in. Now those maps are really scary!

1 comment:

Kai Carver said...

probably inversely proportional to the percentage of their income people spend on housing and some other cost-of-living fees