I'm Still a Nerd

Long ago, when I was new to blogging, I commented that I was a huge nerd because I decided to plot my car mileage vs time. I never stopped being that nerd, now I just have a much larger sample size.


My car mileage is still fairly linear, but you can see that there has been a slight change in the slope over the last couple years. (You can also see that I got really bad about getting my car in for regularly scheduled oil changes in the late 2008, early 2009 timeframe, but let's not focus on that.)

Looking back at the data, I can see that between January 2005 and January 2008 I drove approximately 44,000 miles. Admittedly, I did drive a huge road-trip one Christmas (nearly 4,000 miles in less than two weeks), but that's still averaging just under 15,000 miles per year. Over the more recent 3-year period (January 2008 to January 2011), I drove only ~35,000 miles. The funny thing is, I've actually increased my commute distance by a couple miles per day since June 2008. How am I driving less?

I think the big change is that in June 2008 I moved close a train station that allowed me to occasionally take commuter rail to work instead of drive. Nowadays I can also take the light rail or bike to the train station. I have also, over the last few years, become a big fan of new urbanism, walkable neighborhoods, and public transit (I've always been a fan of biking places if possible). Also, more recently, I've moved in with my girlfriend and now make her drive me places sometimes because car pooling is more efficient or I'm planning to drink alcohol (or I'm feeling lazy and talk her into driving). Also, this last fall I had a problem with a bent wheel that I procrastinated on fixing because I didn't want to pay all the money since I knew I needed tires anyway.

All of this combined means that I drove around 11,300 miles in calendar year 2010. That's about 2,400 less than I drove the first 12 months I owned my car!

Finally, in what is definitely a miracle of Honda engineering, my car continues to get around 30-32 mpg on average. So by those numbers, I'm saving myself 75 gallons a year which was probably worth between $150 and $225!

Finally, in a particularly ironic turn of events, in my 2007 blog post on my driving I was pissed off to learn how much of my gasoline costs went to taxes. Now, in 2011, I've educated myself a lot more about transportation funding/policy and I've seen some income growth while inflation has been nearly non-existent. As a result, I'm now a huge fan of raising taxes on gasoline in Maryland (since the gasoline tax is not indexed to inflation and has not been increased since 1992), especially if its used to fund effective public transportation, bicycle transit improvements, or improve run-off control from existing highways.

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By the way, the latter part of the last decade was actually a period of time in which the US was becoming less car dependent. Some group called The Center for Clean Air Policy released a study that included a chart showing that from 1960 into the mid-90's GDP growth and growth in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tracked each other almost exactly. But around 1995, the two started to diverge, with GDP growth outpacing the growth in VMT. Very, very encouraging news! Good blog post with commentary from the New York Times.

Baltimore Murder Charts - Year End 2010 Edition

I haven't been the best at updating my blog recently, but one of the few original things I post regularly are charts covering Baltimore murders. My sources remain Murder Ink from the City Paper and the Baltimore Crime blog.

Murder trends for 2010 were not nearly as exciting as 2009. Murders declined again, but not by a large number. Most of 2010 looked like 2009, the main exception being that there were far fewer deaths classified as homicides due to prior year murders. As I've been doing, any homicides classified due to an act in a prior year are counted in that prior year (by going back and editing data). So using this methodology I get slightly different numbers than the official tally, but I think it's better for tracking trends.

In 2009 there were officially 238 murders in Baltimore, but 14 of them were due to acts of violence from prior years, so I count that as 224 murders. In 2010 there were officially 223 murders in Baltimore, but 4 of them were due to acts of violence in prior years (none of them from 2009 though, so no upward modification). So while the official numbers drop from 238 to 223 (a 6.3% decrease), my count drops from 224 to 219 (a 2.2% decrease).

Still, we've come a long way since 2007. The 2010 total is down 20% from 2007. The improvements are pretty obvious when you look at the homicides by month and the cumulative plot of homicides for the last four years.



In fact, 2007 was such a higher total than 2008-10, it's actually better to remove it to compare the more recent years.


So what do we have? Looks mostly like stability. Sure, from 2008 to 2010 there were about 14 fewer homicides in Baltimore, a total of a 6% decrease. Not terribly impressive, even if murders continue decreasing at this rate we'll have to wait until 2017 to see murders become something that happens only every other day. That's not a terribly cheerful prediction. Hopefully the continued focus on reducing illegal guns in the city will continue to lower shootings and homicide rate will drop faster.

It needs to. Baltimore's per capita murder rate remains one of the worst in the country. At 35 per 100,000 (my math based on 223 official murders and U.S. Census estimated population for 2009). However, if you are African-American in Baltimore the per-capita murder rate is unbelievable. According to Anna Ditkoff of Murder Ink, 90.6% of 2010's murder victims were African-American. Based on Baltimore's demographics, this indicates that African-Americans in Baltimore face a 50 per 100,000 per capita murder rate while residents of other races experience a 9 per 100,000 per capita murder rate. To put that in perspective, residents who are not African-American are safer in Baltimore than the average Albuquerque resident (source: Wikipedia article on crime in US cities).

Finally, my favorite chart that I create for tracking murder trends:


Vertical axis magnified:

Links to previous year's homicide summaries:
2009 Year End Summary
2008 Year End Summary