Energy saving and emission reduction of traditional vehicles propelled by gasoline are still imperative. Intuitively a driver’s socio-demographic characteristics could impact her driving behavior and further effect the fuel consumption. By horizontal comparison, fuel consumption may differ across drivers. While longitudinally speaking, the fuel consumption of the same driver may even change across different driving environment. However, such relationship between drivers’ socio-demographic characters and fuel consumption remains unclear. In this work, we depict the correlation between demographic attributes and fuel consumption during peak and off-peak hours using naturalistic driving data collected from a busy freeway segment in Austin, Texas. FASTSim was adopted to calculate the fuel consumption level of the travel segment. The results show that during off-peak periods, commuting frequency is the most positively correlated factor with fuel consumption and frequent commuters who reported to commute 5 days per week consume 7.8% more fuel per mile compared to those who commute 1-2 days per week. Besides, fuel consumption is also closely related to commuting purpose, age and gender. On the contrary, during peak traffic time, non-frequent commuters’ fuel consumption per mile is higher and the correlation between fuel consumption and driver’s other social attributes is weakened. Our study could shed lights on the promotion of eco-friendly driving education and it ought to be further targeted to those who tend to consume more fuels.

CICTP