I’m writing regarding your story in today’s Daily News
headlined, “No fuelin’: Gas costs up $900 per year”
(http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/446265p-375658c.html).

Frankly, the numbers don’t compute. You write that the $900
pertains to the “average New York-area family”, but later we
find out that it actually means “every two-driver family in the
metro area.”

The U.S. Census data for New York City car ownership is here:

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=05000US36005&-geo_id=05000US36047&-geo_id=05000US36061&-geo_id=05000US3
6081&-geo_id=05000US36085&-gc_url=&-reg=&-ds_name=ACS_C2SS_EST_G00_&-_lang=en&-mt_name=ACS_C2SS_EST_G2000_H041

(or http://nyc-car-ownership.notlong.com )

Using the “Estimate” columns, you can calculate that

1) 2-car households make up only 8.2% of all NYC households
2) A majority (53.5%) of NYC households do not own any cars

(I’ll leave it up to you to determine what percentage of the
“metro area” is NYC — generally it’s somewhere around 50% in
the city and 50% in the surrounding counties of NY/NJ/CT.)

In the future, please include more information about what
actually makes up an “average” family in the metro area. I
believe that implying that everyone has 2 cars is misleading and
creates an expectation that does not square with reality.

Sincerely,

And the economic cost of just the gasoline price increase is staggering as well.

The average New York-area family is spending nearly $900 a year more on gas than just five years ago, a new congressional study shows.
With prices at the pump nearly doubling, drivers in and around the city shelled out an extra $3 billion for gas in 2006 compared with 2001.

That’s a whopping $880 a year, or about $75 a month, for every two-driver family in the metro area.

A lot of good could be done with that $3 billions a year here locally to build a better mass transit infrastructure. Instead it’s going away to other areas and in some places supporting destabilizing regimes…