The geography of gasoline consumption

Ed: Both this analysis and the Glaser and Kahn paper are missing the gasoline multiplier - the impact of gasoline on general inflation of all goods and services. Logistics of moving goods and services depend on gasoline and other fuels.

Consumption also has a multiplier effect on pollution. 

The geography of gasoline consumption

I've done some more thinking about the Glaser and Kahn paper I bogged about the other day.  Glaser and Kahn examine total energy use among major metropolitan areas in order to compare cities carbon emissions.  But their data also allow us to compare gasoline use city by city.  That's just as interesting a comparison, at least to me.

Glaser and Khan even allow us to make an apples-to-apples comparison because they have constructed a composite "median" household for each city to use as their points of reference.  For example, they don't use per capita gasoline consumption as their point of comparison.  They instead estimate the expected gasoline consumption of a hypothetical $62,000/year household with 2.62 members for each city, using survey data and (I assume) some fancy statistical techniques...

This chart makes the point better:

There is no question that steep gas price hikes would hurt Houston (or Dallas or Austin) households.  At $3/gallon, the Houston household is already spending 5.4% of its gross income on gasoline.  At $4/gallon, it would have to spend 7.2% of gross income on gasoline, assuming no change in gasoline consumption.  But the Sana Francisco household is spending 4.8% of its gross income on gasoline, a figure that would rise to 6.4% with a $1 increase in the price of gasoline.  That 0.8% difference is smaller than I expected.