An Associated Press article found that the typical American household pays $4,155 a year to fill their gas tanks—or 8.4 percent of median family income. Research by the Center for Neighborhood Technology has found that living in location efficient places—walkable communities with access to amenities and transit—helps people keep transportation costs low compared with people [...]
Introducing the Gas Slider
We hope you’ll enjoy the Abogo Gas Slider, although what you discover may be painful: rising gas prices are going to affect the cost of transportation where you live and not in a positive way. Use this new tool to see what transportation would cost a typically regional family at different gas prices. To use the slider, type in an address to find the baseline 2000 cost of transportation. Then click on the gas pump icon:
The slider will pop up, and you’ll be able to change the gas price.
Remember, Abogo isn’t just about the cost of your commute, or even just the cost of driving: our model predicts how many cars a typical household would own living at an address, how far they would drive those cars, and how often they would use transit. Rising gas prices affects the cost of driving a car. But no matter what the gas price, we still factor in depreciation, insurance, and maintenance: all the costs of a car, even if it’s sitting in your driveway.
We’ll update the average national gas price weekly, using data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. You can find the data here.
As you can see, gas prices are already higher than they were the same time of year in 2008, the last time prices spiked and everyone started thinking about how to get around without breaking the bank.
You may notice that places with low transportation costs to begin with also have lower percent change in cost from 2000 than places in the red, with higher transportation costs. That is, places where people are able to use alternatives to cars like walking, biking, transit, and car-sharing, are less vulnerable to gas price shocks than people who simply have no other option than to drive.
You can find plenty of resources on how to lower your transportation costs on our tips page. We want to highlight two important ones:
- Take transit where possible and make sure their employers have signed up for pre-tax transit benefits. Pre-tax transit benefits are an underutilized “use it or lose it” federal tax break administered through employers. Employees can save up to 40 percent on their commuting costs by buying transit fare before paying taxes. In Chicago, Cook County employers currently can receive up to $1,700 for simply enrolling their employees into the program.
- Curb your car and sign up for car sharing. Americans spend an annual average of $7,319 to own, operate, and maintain their cars, according to the AAA. A typical member of I-GO ® Car Sharing in Chicago spends roughly $2,520 per year on transportation. Car sharing gets people where they need to go without worrying about gas prices. Members pay for cars by the hour, and gas is included in the hourly fee (as is insurance), so no need to worry about its price. Chicago’s I-GO has cars that are gas sippers, and it will soon add 30+ electric cars to our fleet that don’t use gasoline at all. There are 10 other nonprofit car-sharing organizations across the country. Find one in your city at carsharing.org.
Be sure to leave comments on what you like and what isn’t so clear. We’ll be updating our FAQs as we go, so please be in touch.
