Waiting for Lunchtime: May 2008

27 May, 2008

How much to fill 'er up?

If you're in the UK, then unless you had the television and radio off all day today you can't fail to have noticed that there was a protest by lorry drivers about the cost of fuel. So it was probably not coincidental that The Guardian chose today to publish a blog post by their Technology Editor Charles Arthur, claiming that petrol is not that pricey really.

So when you plot petrol prices adjusted by inflation, they're not particularly excessive at the moment. Interesting, and quite a surprise (well, to me anyway). Ever the sceptic, I decided to calculate the same set of data for myself. Additionally, spurred on by one of the commenters on that post, I also decided to see what would happen if you plotted petrol prices against average earnings (also adjusted for inflation, of course).

My results for the first set of data (price per gallon adjusted for inflation) agree broadly with those created by The Guardian:

(click to view larger)

There are slight differences, presumably because we've used slightly different sets of data for petrol price or RPI calculations, but broadly the graphs show the same thing: namely that in real terms petrol prices peaked during the First World War, reached all-time lows in 1927 and 1948, and have fluctuated around a common point throughout the post-War era. Obviously there have been ups and downs (a notable low in the late 70s with peaks either side of it) and the price today is somewhat above the average, but nothing ridiculous.

Now I produced a graph comparing real-terms price per gallon compared to real-terms average earnings. This one really is a shocker!

(click to view larger)

Astonishing to behold, but in terms of cost per earnings petrol hit an all-time low in about 1989 and has hardly changed since. Petrol has literally never been as affordable as it has been for the past 15 years!

If anyone wants to view my figures, or check my methodology, the spreadsheet containing my data (in OpenOffice format) is available here.

Labels: politics, statistics