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28 comments on Hurricanes increase driving, gas prices decrease it

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odograph on December 23, 2005 - 6:33pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
Interesting trends, but my gut still tells me that the monitering is not sufficient for the level of detail I want.

Look at the actual number of measuring stations on page 5, and the footer:

"Note: Where Number of Stations are shown as dashes, the values for the Vehicle-Miles and Percent Change are derived from the estimated VMT based on data from surrounding States or the nationwide average VMT."

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Stuart Staniford on December 23, 2005 - 6:48pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Fair point - I think the monthly state data are less reliable than the national annual data which incorporates the moving surveys as well as fixed data points.  However, as with oil data, we do the best we can with what we have...
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odograph on December 23, 2005 - 7:01pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Oh, I'm sure we can draw some general information from the data ... but I just have a bad feeling that the data, and the relation to GDP, are too self-referential.
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Stuart Staniford on December 23, 2005 - 7:23pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I don't see any reason why there's any contamination with GDP stats.  You can argue there's sampling errors in the VMT, but the correlation with GDP is evidence that there is some useful information there, rather than the contrary.
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28 comments on Hurricanes increase driving, gas prices decrease it

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