[Background: Type "G" (for Geek) people like myself first get riled by something, then get busy with SAS to see if our riling was justified. This is the first in a series of pages that exercise SAS products, sometimes strenuously, to address ideas that struck a chord with me. I must admit that I was surprised by how many obscure (for me, at least) parts of SAS/GRAPH were required to produce the figures: animated GIFs, ANNOTATE data sets, and tricks like overloading variable values to fake out PROC PLOT. That, plus some new JavaScript features, made this a learning experience in addition to a venting forum.]
I can't stand whiners and complainers. And I really can't abide by people who
persist in shrill, semi-reasoned screeds that in the Big Scheme of Things just point out
they are complaining about very, very minor things. Show me, for example, an American who drives an Excursion,
makes $150,000 a year, and gripes endlessly about
the price of gas going up, costing him an extra $20 to tow his boat to the
lake house. Then, show me how to fight the urge to slap him
senseless and tell him how incredibly lucky he is to have that as his problem du jour.
I'll admit that I wasn't thrilled with the gas price increases of early 2004. I drive
a Saturn sedan with a modest-sized engine and a stick shift, so I fill up about every ten days.
Still, when the media kept ranting about how ruinous the increases were,
I began to wonder if maybe I was uninformed and really did need to get hysterical.
The tables and figures you can display in the bottom frame (see the display index)
suggest that no, hysteria is not warranted but yes, some of you will have to give up that
daily run to the Krispy Kreme. I wrote a simple program that generated data and graphed it. The data accounts for
the three factors that affect your driving cost: your car's efficiency (miles per gallon); what you
pay for a gallon of gas; and the number of miles you drive in a year.
The data ranges from driving 20,000 miles a year in a 15 mpg vehicle paying a California-like $2.50
per gallon to a more benign 10,000 miles a year sipping $1.50 gas and getting 40 mpg.
The Big Picture: Annual Costs
The first set of graphs represents annual cost of fuel for the different miles driven, mpg, and
gas costs. No surprises here. For 12,000 miles per year, near the national average, the 15 mpg
drivers who used to pay $1,200 per year when gas was $1.50 now pay $1,600 at $2.00 a gallon, an
increase of $400 per year. (view chart)
At the other consumption extreme, 40 mpg, the tale of woe going from $1.50 to $2.00 a gallon is
less severe. Annual fuel cost jumps from $450 to $600. At $150, this increase is $250 less than
the gas guzzlers.
The More Focused Picture: Daily Costs
What impact do any of these increases have on a daily basis? That's what the "Daily Cost"
charts address. Looking again at our extreme cases at 12,000 miles, we see the gas guzzler
used to spend about $3.29 daily last year, when gas cost $1.50. At the same time, the economical
40 mpg driver shelled out $1.23 a day. Ramp up the cost per gallon to $2.00, and our extreme
cases now pay $4.38 and $1.64 per day, respectively. When you look at it this way, chopping
up the annual increase into 365 pieces, it doesn't look that bad.
(view chart)
Certainly, we can find events with greater impact to get worked up about. Just wait, it gets better ...
The Real Picture: The Change in Daily Costs
If the media wanted to get us worked up over price increases, the real question they should
have posed would have been "are you really that agitated about the amount of change from what you used to pay?"
That is, talk about it in relative, not absolute, terms.
Going back to our 15mpg-40mpg comparison at 12,000 miles puts things into the most realistic perspective
we've seen so far. The 15mpg driver who paid $1.50 last year and now spends
$2.00 is doling out an extra $1.10 per day. The 40mpg driver facing the same cost increase
spends only, get ready to squint, $0.41 more per day.
(view chart)
Here's the kicker ... Let's assume that going to Krispy Kreme or Dunkin' Donuts consumes at
least some of the mileage we're
talking about. Let's also assume that a donut and coffee runs about $2.25. Maybe
the real question to ask is "Can I beat the increase in cost by giving up the trip to the donut shop?"
The summary chart
tells us that you'd have to be driving a guzzler and paying over $2.10 per gallon before you enter the
Dunkin-Free Zone (the "DFZ"). If you drive anything more economical, or pay less per gallon, you'd have
to give up only the donut (maybe this should be called the South Beach Zone).