If people were unwilling to pay the transaction fees the transaction backlog and transaction fees would dry up extremely quickly. The fees operate on supply and demand, the more transactions there are normally means people get antsy about moving their coins and start congesting the network with high fee transactions so that they will go through first. I would be willing to say that there is no (or next to none) correlation between transaction fees and a decrease in bitcoin price. It's not as though these transaction fees are arbitrarily imposed upon each transaction; it very much operates on supply and demand, and right now there is a high demand for bitcoin transaction, which means higher fees, not lower price. In my opinion you're trying to connect two dots on different pages, they just don't go together. At best, high-volume of transactions and high transactions fees would correlate with price drops about 50% of the time; because if you simplify price jumps and falls pretty rigidly it could be either dumps or pumps.