Title: The Cost of Transportation : Spatial Analysis of US Fuel Prices,
Abstract: The geography of fuel prices has many various implications, from its
significant impact on accessibility to being an indicator of territorial equity
and transportation policy. In this paper, we study the spatio-temporal patterns
of fuel price in the US at a very high resolution using a newly constructed
dataset collecting daily oil prices for two months, on a significant proportion
of US gas facilities. These data have been collected using a
specifically-designed large scale data crawling technology that we describe. We
study the influence of socio-economic variables, by using complementary
methods: Geographically Weighted Regression to take into account spatial
non-stationarity, and linear econometric modeling to condition at the state and
test county level characteristics. The former yields an optimal spatial range
roughly corresponding to stationarity scale, and significant influence of
variables such as median income or wage per job, with a non-simple spatial
behavior that confirms the importance of geographical particularities. On the
other hand, multi-level modeling reveals a strong state fixed effect, while
county specific characteristics still have significant impact. Through the
combination of such methods, we unveil the superposition of a governance
process with a local socio- economical spatial process. We discuss one
important application that is the elaboration of locally parametrized
car-regulation policies.