Higher Gas Prices, fewer motor vehicle fatalities

Higher gas prices amounts to people driving less often, less fast, and in less gigantic cars. It's not too surprising, then, that motor vehicle fatalities also decline when prices rise.

In an analysis of fuel prices and motor vehicle fatality data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 1985 to 2006, Michael Morrisey of the University of Alabama at Birmingham and David Grabowski of Harvard Medical School found that a 10% increase in gas prices was associated with a 2.3% decline in auto deaths for all drivers, a 6% decline for drivers ages 15 to 17, and a 3.2% drop for drivers ages 18 to 21.

If the results of the study (presented at the meeting of the American Society of Health Economists) do not assuage some of the grumbling about rising prices (they won't), they at least lend credence to arguements that the costs to society of automobile use and gasoline consumption were not fully captured in the prices paid at the pump, especially when prices are low. Now gasoline may in fact be priced more closely to the actual costs to society, but the revenues from its sale, of course, do not go directly to remedying the problems that's its use creates.