Nate Silver takes score on Americans’ changing driving habits

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Nate Silver, a renown blogger of baseball sabermetrics fame, has come across empirical evidence that shows Americans aren’t driving as much as we used to. Silver invented the PECOTA, or Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm, which helps to analyze major league baseball players’ performance, and also created FiveThirtyEight.com -- a political blog where he used his ‘inside baseball’ love of statistics and arcane mathematical regressions to correctly predict the electoral votes in the 2008 presidential election for 49 of the 50 states and the winner of every U.S. Senate race.

Silver has turned his somewhat jaundiced eye to the automotive industry in this month’s Esquire magazine. In his ‘The Data’ column, Silver posits that it’s more than high gas prices and an economy on the skids that are helping to systematically change the amount we Americans drive, and that maybe, just maybe, this reflects a change within our national psyche. His findings suggest a one-year delay in Americans’ response to gas crises and our growing lack of dependence on cars -- all this coming from a non-car-driving New Yorker. Silver does this with his usual mix of statistics and anthropological insight.

Now if he can only create a regression model to help us figure out when Manny will be Manny.

-- Jon Alain Guzik

Jon Alain Guzik is editor in chief at Driverside.com