<Hawaii's "Energy for tomorrow"The Oil DrumA Thursday Open Thread>

27 comments on Yep, Stuart's right about GSP/Cap...VMT does matter, even multivariately...

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Stuart Staniford on January 18, 2006 - 10:29pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
Now the question is: why?
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Grynn on January 19, 2006 - 8:13am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
A possible reason...

Do high VMTs indicate the ruralness of a state?

For example I stay in a pretty rural area (out in the sticks) and have to commute to London pretty much every other week. This is because there's just not that many shops, restaurants and things to do in the area where I live. Commuting to work is easy though.

If you live in the suburbs of a large city you spend a lot of time in traffic - so high hours in vehicle, low actual miles travelled. OTOH if you live in a rural area with low traffic - relatively more miles travelled for each hour spent in a vehicle.

It seems sensible that a large number of miles travelled implies low traffic (because everyone has the same number of hours per day). Low traffic, high miles indicates rural areas? which would have lower gsp/cap values.

Thus if the price of oil rises dramatically - it would tax rural areas more than urban areas - and the price of land in rural areas should fall. This seems contrary to what some economists are predicting!

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Stuart Staniford on January 19, 2006 - 4:34pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Well, that was the original idea, but supposedly the population density variable would capture that effect...
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jkissing on January 19, 2006 - 4:19pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
A confounding issue is cost of living - salaries are higher in NYC, but living standards may be lower, so gdp/cap must be adjusted to reflect spending power in rural vs urban settings. In this case, gdp/cap is high, vmt/cap is very low.

Otherwise, how about this:
a) The more you drive, the less time and money you have to earn/create wealth.
I guess the following just says it another way..
b) The further you have to drive to work, the less return on your investment of time and money input vs salary output. At some point, it is not worth working.

I think there must be some optimum size of city for (COL adjusted) wealth creation - large enough that jobs are available and work is reasonably close, small enough that commutes are not too long.

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