The consequences of metropolitan decentralization for personal gasoline consumption

It is often argued that more decentralized and spatially dispersed metropolitan areas require their residents to consume more gasoline than more centralized metropolitan areas. This notion is deduced from the assumption that, (1) populations decentralize, and (2) as this happens, people locate at distances farther removed from metropolitan centers which house most of the services, shops and jobs which suburban residents must travel to. In this article, it is argued that, at advanced stages of metropolitanization, the places to which people travel also decentralize and as this happens the gasoline consumption of metropolitan residents in more decentralized areas actually becomes lower than that of residents in more centralized areas. The latter argument is tested using multiple indicators of decentralization, and a number of control variables. All of the indicators of expansion relate to gasoline consumption in the predicted direction; the implications of this for energy and location policy are discussed.This research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (SOC 7826121 and SOC 77-07579), and the Program of University Research, U.S. Department of Transportation (80-193).