Americans paid more for gasoline in 2004

Americans paid more for gasoline in 2004 than in 2003, and the biggest cost escalation occurred in metropolitan Los Angeles, where the average household’s expenditure rose by $316. That finding is contained in “Driven to Spend,” a new report from the Surface Transportation Policy Project and the Center for Neighborhood Technology, which ranks 28 metro areas on their combined transportation and housing costs. Families in metropolitan Houston had the highest overall transportation expenditures: 20.9 percent of their household budgets. The regions where transportation consumed the smallest share of household budgets were Baltimore, at 14 percent; Portland, Oregon, 15.1 percent; New York and Washington, DC, both 15.4 percent; and Philadelphia, 15.9 percent. The report is available at www.transact.org. u