In the following link, you can scroll through 3 outputs: Tree Map, US Map, and sorted table. None of these in-and-of-themselves are “best”, but I like to look at the same data in several different ways to help get a more complete understanding:

http://robslink.com/SAS/democd9/gasoline.htm

Note that in the tree map and US map, you can click on the each state to “drilldown” to the AAA page for more detailed info on that state’s gas prices.

http://ryangoodman.net/blog/index.php/2008/06/26/gas-prices-at-the-pump-dashboard

Here is the message I got - Yikes! (maybe they can add dashboardspy to the list of ok’d non-spammers?):

“403 Forbidden
Please stop referer spam.
We have identified that you have been refered here by a known or supposed spammer.”

I really like this dashboard and whilst I agree with Jon’s comments entirely, I also think that this is both very accessible (bear in mind the target audience) and does not mislead, which is really the biggest sin a dashboard could commit.

So overall, a thumbs up - a great dashboard for its purpose, but able to be improved still further.

Historical trends would be awesome to provide a more holistic view of just how bad the gas price situation is, but unfortunately it was not made available to me.

For the calculator, I wanted to avoid over-complicating the calculation for this particular dashboard. The question I wanted to answer was “roughly how much am I spending given the current price for gas in my state?” I did not address the next question: “What can I do to save money or boost efficiency?” We could certainly build a much more complex application that would consider fuel efficiency, miles driven, driving conditions, and region gas averages. I have already spoken to someone who has built something similar and hope to merge the two applications sometime soon. The ultimate would be an application where users can enter what they pay over time, then calculate and track how much they save by modifying driving behavior.

Best Regards,
Ryan Goodman

The dashboard would be more effective if you could also adjust factors like fuel efficiency and miles driven. This would help for example when deciding whether to switch cars with a family member who drives a substantially different number of miles, or when planning a schedule of four 10-hour days instead of five 8-hour days.