I am not so sure about this.

At the end of the day, in order for the price of bitcoin to increase over the long term, it needs to be used by a larger user base, and each member of the user base needs to use it for a greater share of the total commerce they take part of. Both of these will require much larger block sizes.

I acknowledge this is not a statistically significant data sample, however as of block 393904, the smallest of the last 7 blocks was ~910 kb, and 3 were greater then 970kb. According to blockchain.info, there is roughly 8.8 MB worth of unconfirmed transactions (with total fees worth ~1.48 BTC) in it's mempool, and this is at a time when 3 blocks were found in the last 8 minutes.

When discussing the urgency of raising the block size, you need to remember that your "joe user" is not going to care about how long it takes on average to get a transaction confirmed, they are going to care about how long it takes their transaction confirmed. On the same subject, there will sometimes be "spikes" in the number of transactions per second, and if the maximum block size is not sufficient to get all of the transactions quickly confirmed during times of these "spikes" then it will create a negative user experience, and users may not wish to continue using Bitcoin.

I would also say, if, for arguments sake that the maximum block size does not need to be raised immediately, then is there any harm in raising it prior to it being necessary? I don't claim to be an expert, however I would think that the result of raising the max block size to 2MB prior to being necessary is that we would mostly see blocks that are under 1MB with an occasional ~1.95MB block that is the result of testing.