Reducing Gasoline Consumption Research Articles

The car and fuel of the future

This paper is based on a review of the technical literature on alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) and discussions with experts in vehicle technology and energy analysis. It is derived from analysis provided to the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy. The urgent need to reverse the business-as-usual growth path in global warming pollution in the next two decades to avoid serious if not catastrophic climate change necessitates action to make our vehicles far less polluting. In the near-term, by far the most cost-effective strategy for reducing emissions and fuel use is efficiency. The car of the near future is the hybrid gasoline–electric vehicle, because it can reduce gasoline consumption and greenhouse gas emissions 30 to 50% with no change in vehicle class and hence no loss of jobs or compromise on safety or performance. It will likely become the dominant vehicle platform by the year 2020. Ultimately, we will need to replace gasoline with a zero-carbon fuel. All AFV pathways require technology advances and strong government action to succeed. Hydrogen is the most challenging of all alternative fuels, particularly because of the enormous effort needed to change our existing gasoline infrastructure. The most promising AFV pathway is a hybrid that can be connected to the electric grid. These so-called plug-in hybrids or e-hybrids will likely travel three to four times as far on a kilowatt-hour of renewable electricity as fuel cell vehicles. Ideally these advanced hybrids would also be a flexible fuel vehicle capable of running on a blend of biofuels and gasoline. Such a car could travel 500 miles on 1 gal of gasoline (and 5 gal of cellulosic ethanol) and have under one-tenth the greenhouse gas emissions of current hybrids.

Clearing the air: The costs and consequences of higher CAFE standards and increased gasoline taxes

Concerns about energy security and climate change have sparked legislators’ interest in reducing gasoline consumption by increasing corporate average fuel-economy (CAFE) standards. Using an empirically rich simulation model and cost estimates for anticipated fuel-economy technologies, we estimate annual costs of reducing long-run gasoline consumption by 10% via a 3.8 miles per gallon increase in the standards, and the potential cost savings from allowing manufacturers to buy and sell fuel-economy credits. Maximum gasoline savings would be realized only after all existing vehicles were replaced, or 14 years in our model. A gasoline tax would produce greater immediate savings by encouraging people to drive less, and eventually to choose more-fuel-efficient vehicles. We demonstrate the advantage of a tax by comparing the cost of the higher CAFE standards over the first 14 years against the cost of a gasoline tax that would save the same amount of gasoline over that time.

Here Comes Hypercar!

Despite the fact that the price of gasoline seems stuck around $2.00 per gallon, gas-guzzling SUVs and pickups remain as popular as ever among Americans. The United States produces 25% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions; cars and light trucks account for around 20% of the nation’s energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. It would appear that a gas-saving, nonpolluting car for the U.S. masses will need to be something that even car enthusiast magazines could applaud. It will need to equal or beat conventional cars in handling, performance, size, safety, and amenities, and do so at a competitive cost. It’s a tall order, but Amory Lovins, chief executive officer of the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) in Snowmass, Colorado, thinks he may have just the car to meet it: the Hypercar®. The latest version of Lovins’s Hypercar concept is a detailed virtual design illustrating an SUV crossover vehicle that would fully compete with today’s midsize entry-level luxury SUVs. Powered by a hybridized hydrogen fuel cell, the concept, dubbed Revolution, would achieve Environmental Protection Agency mileage ratings equivalent to 108 miles per gallon (mpg) of gasoline; as a Prius-like gasoline hybrid, 62 mpg, and with a good nonhybrid gasoline engine, 45 mpg, according to extensive RMI simulations. The gasoline hybrid version could sell profitably for $40,000–45,000 (in year 2000 dollars), at standard markups based on what Lovins calls extensive supplier price quotations for 82% of the components, plus bottom-up cost modeling by RMI and independent consultants for technologies not yet in production. Further development could pare the price to about $35,000. But Lovins’s concept goes beyond transportation. A national fleet of fuel cell–powered Hypercar-class vehicles could contribute to the national electricity grid when they are parked—which averages about 96% of the time, according to the Population Reference Bureau. And according to RMI, if Hypercars captured half of the world’s market by 2020, global carbon dioxide emissions from cars and trucks would fall 25%, instead of rising by 12%. (This estimate assumes that the efficiency of conventional cars improves by 25%, and vehicle miles traveled increases by 50%.)

Is Pay-as-You-Drive Insurance a Better Way to Reduce Gasoline than Gasoline Taxes?

Gasoline taxes are widely perceived as the most efficient instrument for reducing gasoline consumption because they exploit all behavioral responses for reducing fuel use, including reduced driving and improved fuel economy. At present, however, higher fuel taxes are viewed as a political nonstarter. Pay-as-you-drive (PAYD) auto insurance, which involves replacing existing lump-sum premiums with premiums that vary in proportion to miles driven, should be more practical, since they do not raise driving costs for the average motorist. We show that when impacts on a broad range of motor vehicle externalities are considered, PAYD also induces significantly higher welfare gains than comparable gasoline tax increases, for fuel reductions below 9%. The reason is that under PAYD, all of the reduction in fuel use, rather than just a fraction, comes from reduced driving; this produces a substantial additional efficiency gain because mileage-related external costs (especially congestion and accidents) are relatively large in magnitude.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

The Cost of Reducing Gasoline Consumption

High nominal gas prices, new awareness of threats to national security, and growing concern about global warming have reignited discussion of ways to reduce gasoline consumption in the United States. Debate centers on changing two policies already in place: the federal gas tax and Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Two influential recent reports find that increasing the gas tax would attain a given reduction in gas consumption at lower cost than would tightening CAFE standards (National Research Council, 2002; Congressional Budget Office, 2003). The gas tax has this advantage because it encourages not just increases in fuel efficiency, but also reductions in miles driven. In contrast, CAFE standards actually encourage more driving, because increases in fuel efficiency reduce the cost of gas per mile driven. We also compare the costs of the gas tax and CAFE standard but take into account interactions with preexisting tax distortions. Many papers examine the effects of these tax interactions in other contexts, but to our knowledge none of them considers the CAFE standard (see e.g., Lars Bovenberg and Ruud de Mooij, 1994; Ian Parry, 1995; Lawrence Goulder, 1995; Bovenberg and Goulder, 1996; Parry et al., 1999; Don Fullerton and Gilbert Metcalf, 2001). These interactions reduce the cost of the gas tax but increase the cost of CAFE, thus expanding the cost advantage enjoyed by the gas tax. This difference does not arise because the gas tax raises revenue, while the CAFE standard does not. Rather, this result is similar to that in West and Williams (2004a), which showed that, since gasoline and leisure are relative complements, raising the gas tax will increase labor supply, generating additional efficiency gains. In this paper, we estimate a consumer demand system using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the California Air Resources Board and find that miles driven and leisure are relative complements. Thus, the gas tax encourages labor supply by raising the cost per mile driven, producing an additional efficiency gain. Conversely, because CAFE reduces the cost per mile, it discourages labor supply and yields an additional efficiency loss. While the induced changes in labor supply are tiny relative to the labor market, they are still substantial relative to the gas market and thus have a dramatic effect on the relative costs of the two policies. Our point estimates imply that they reduce the social marginal cost of the gas tax (starting from the status quo gas tax rate and ignoring the benefits of reduced gas consumption) by almost 30 percent, while increasing the marginal cost of CAFE by nearly 60 percent. This result implies that the case for raising the gas tax rather than tightening the CAFE standard is far stronger than previous studies suggest. Indeed, it strongly suggests that any tightening at all of the CAFE standard would lower welfare unless the benefits of reduced gas consumption have been seriously underestimated.

Management of Urban Consolidation Plan and Flood Disaster Prevention

Several studies have already indicated that building the compact urban layout issignificant countermeasure for reducing gasoline consumption and achieving more sustainable society. Meanwhile, so far Japanese cities have suffered from flooding caused by typhoons and heavy rain. As a prevent flood disaster, it should be effective that people retreat from hazardous areas from the hydrological point of view. The previously built up and presently underutilized land must be recycled as retarding basin. This study aims to evaluate the compact urban layout and desirable retreat patterns by SLIM CITY from the point of view of disaster prevention.

Policy Watch: The Economics of Fuel Economy Standards

One of the most hotly contested of all energy policy issues involves Corporate Average Fuel Economy (or CAFE) standards for new cars and light-duty trucks. Tighter standards would reduce gasoline consumption, and hence both greenhouse gas emissions as well as this country's vulnerability to oil price shocks. But they would also increase the price of new vehicles, worsen traffic congestion and–depending on how they are phased in–possibly even reduce occupant safety. These effects are amenable to economic analysis, and we review the evidence to date bearing on this interesting and important question.

Optimizing Tax Strategies to Reduce Greenhouse Gases Without Curtailing Growth

Increasing federal gasoline taxes is one of the policy options available for reducing gasoline consumption and the resulting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that contribute to global warming. At the request of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), DRI/McGraw-Hill (DRI) estimated the levels of gasoline tax that would be necessary to stabilize CO2 emissions from the light-vehicle fleet over a 20-year period, and the economic impacts of such a tax. Three options for utilizing the revenues generated are examined: a reduction of the federal budget deficit, a reduction in personal and corporate income taxes, and a reduction in the employer-paid portion of payroll taxes. Each option would yield markedly different levels of economic performance: while the first two options would result in reductions in economic growth, the third option (a reduction in the employer-paid portion of payroll taxes) would result in relatively slight negative economic impacts in the short term and positive economic impacts in the long term.

Disaggregate Analysis of the Demand for Gasoline

In this paper, we adopt a disaggregate approach to modelling the components of gasoline demand. Gasoline demand in our model is viewed as the outcome of the fol- lowing household decisions: vehicle holdings (number and type) and vehicle usage (non- discretionary and discretionary usage). Modelling gasoline demand in this way correctly specifies gasoline as an input into the production of transportation services and allows for the interdependence between household decisions on vehicle holdings and usage. Moreover, estimation of the components of gasoline demand allows policy makers to identify the means by which individuals will respond to policy changes. This leads to more effective policies designed to reduce gasoline consumption. We use this model to estimate price and fuel efficiency elasticities of vehicle usage and gasoline demand.

Gasoline Consumption and Cities

Abstract Gasoline consumption per capita in ten large United States cities varies by up to 40 percent, primarily because of land use and transportation planning factors, rather than price or income variations. The same patterns, though more extreme, appear in a global sample of 32 cities. Here, average gasoline consumption in U.S. cities was nearly twice as high as in Australian cities, four times higher than in European cities and ten times higher than in Asian cities. Allowing for variations in gasoline price, income, and vehicle efficiency explains only half of these differences. We suggest physical planning policies, particularly reurbanization and a reorientation of transportation priorities as a means of reducing gasoline consumption and automobile dependence.

The Limits of Market-Oriented Regulatory Techniques: The Case of Automotive Fuel Economy

The search for more efficient, market-oriented regulatory techniques has produced significant recent advances in several areas. Among these would appear to be the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) approach to reducing gasoline consumption by the domestic automobile fleet. The 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act required manufacturers to sell fleets with a sales-weighted average of 18 miles per gallon in the 1978 model year, 19 mpg in 1979, 20 mpg in 1980, and 27.5 mpg in 1985.1 The standards for the four intervening years were subsequently set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration at 22, 24, 26, and 27 miles per gallon. The advantages of the averaging approach over uniform vehicle standards or a gas guzzler tax are two-fold. First, CAFE permits each firm to increase its overall fuel efficiency in the cheapest manner, since the costs of mileage improvements for different vehicles may be rather different.2 And second, it permits the continuation of a diverse product mix to the consumer, since a uniform standard would probably result in the demise of certain models. These arguments for averaging are now so widely accepted that the principle is being proposed, inter alia, for automotive emissions standards as well. That is, instead of maximum allowable emissions for each and every model, manufacturers could produce models with various levels of pollutants

The demand for gasoline in intra-urban travel: A simulation and some policy implications

The daily gasoline consumption of an individual household for intra-urban travel is simulated, under the assumption of constrained maximization of daily travel distance, using Zahavi's recently developed UMOT model for urban travel demand. A sensitivity analysis based on variations in various conditions pertaining to the cost and speed attributes of private car travel and public transportation, the characteristics of the urban area (including its transportation network) and the socio-economic features of the population provides quantitative estimates of the effects of potential strategies for controlling and/or reducing gasoline consumption. Suggestions for urban transportation system development policy are made in conclusion.

A model of tax-cum-rebate oil (gasoline) policy

This paper develops a model to analyze the impact of alternative tax-cum-rebate policies currently being discussed as possible means of reducing gasoline consumption. The saving in gasoline from a 30-cent/gallon tax is simulated for four alternative rebate schemes and for a variety of elasticity estimates. The short-run impact is found to be small, while the long-run saving would probably be 3 to 6 % (and may even be as high as 9 %). The choice of rebate plans is shown to be an unimportant consideration in terms of the amount of gasoline consumption. It is also found that there would be no negative impact on the government budget under any of the four rebate schemes.

Television feedback used to modify gasoline consumption

Feedback has proven effective in reducing electricity and fuel oil consumption. For the vital energy conservation necessary today, the effect of feedback on the performance of an entire community needs to be examined. The present study provided feedback on the amount of gasoline consumed daily to a mass audience in West Texas via a nightly news television program. The amount of gasoline consumed was reported by gasoline station managers who took the information from automatic pump counters; university students tabulated this data from a random sample ( N =18) of all 190 gasoline stations in the area. Results indicated that a mass audience can reduce gasoline consumption 31.5% when it receives appropriate feedback.

Effects of Federal policies on gasoline consumption

Utilizing theory and econometric evidence presented within, this paper provides rough quantitative estimates of the impacts on passenger car gasoline consumption of several Federal policies. Three distinct time periods are distinguished: pre-embargo, post-embargo but before new car efficiencies standards, and post-standards. In the pre-embargo period the net effect was to reduce gasoline consumption, while for four years after the embargo, policies tended to encourage consumption. The new car average fuel efficiency standards, first effective in 1978, can be expected to greatly influence passenger car gasoline consumption by forcing (possibly uneconomically large) increases in fleet efficiency. With these standards in operation, other policies will have little or no incremental effect on new car efficiency but can work only through influencing vehicle miles: the new car efficiency response to such programs will have been preempted by the standards. For the post-standards era, the net impact of Federal programs will be a reduction in gasoline consumption and a decrease in price elasticity of passenger car gasoline demand.

Optimal Control of Isolated Traffic Signals

The efficiency of isolated traffic signal control can be substantially improved by using more advanced control strategies in combination with better methods for traffic detection. The purpose of this study was to develop and test such methods for practical use.A control strategy named TOL(Traffic Optimization Logic) based upon the criterion of minimization of traffic operating costs and disturbance of the environment at a given traffic demand was developed. The method is similar to the on-line method suggested by A.J. Miller in 1963 and calculates at regular intervals if the prevailing phase should be extended or not based on short-term predictions of the resulting benefit and disbenefit to the different categories of traffic in the intersection.TOL was tested and compared with conventional fixed-time and vehicle-actuated (VA) control with or without bus priority by means of simulation and field experiments. Two intersections were equipped with minicomputors, analog inductive-loop detectors for direct detection of the number of cars in each approach and special equipment for selective detection of buses.Both simulation and field experiment results showed that TOL could decrease average delay with 25% for vehicles and 40% for buses as compared with VA. Cost-benefit analysis showed that the TOL system was cost-effective even if only the benefits of reduced gasoline consumption was considered. In some cases TOL was cost-effective even if only the gasoline reduction for the buses were considered.Another control strategy for isolated intersections is also presented in the paper, namely a phase generating strategy which on-line creates new phases depending on the traffic demand in the intersection. The method is particularly useful in large intersections where the number of possible combinations of green signals is large.

Alternative strategies for reducing gasoline consumption by private automobiles

This paper is devoted to a survey of alternative public strategies and policies to reduce gasoline consumption by the private automobile. The framework is to consider strategies, which consist of various elements designed to help achieve the goal, as implementable through government policies which incorporate various kinds of incentives. The minimization of adverse impacts is an important consideration in evaluating and choosing between strategy and policy options. Broadly speaking, relevant strategies may be classified as those which are design-related, those which affect the market for automobiles, and those which directly influence the market for gasoline. Policy options may be directed at producers, at automobile purchasers, at gasoline purchasers, and at automobile travelers. One conclusion of this survey is that there are two genera of strategies relating to modifications in the automobile and its propulsion system. One is to reoptimize the automobile relative to new criteria —fuel economy and environmental cleanliness—rather than comfort, performance, and low initial cost. The other is to develop a two-vehicle strategy: small, low-powered vehicles for slow, short trips, and larger vehicles for intercity travel.