Gasoline demand

I read recently that the rising price of gas at the pump has correllated strongly with decreased demand. This would imply that people are actually buying less gas as a result of the prices going up so dramatically recently. I thought this seemed strange – I just assumed people would suck it up and continue buying the same amount of gas. Boy was I wrong.
I grabbed the statistics from the Energy Information Administration and gave it a quick rough chart in Excel. Check it out:

The USA Today piece postulates that it’s also due to the fact that fewer truckers are on the road bringing material into and out of New Orleans. Possible, but this seems like such a dramatic shift that it’s hard to imagine just that having such a large impact. Though now that I stare at the data it does fall off rapidly around the time of the hurricane. Hmmm. Anyway, interesting stuff. 🙂