Last year, vehicle travel on all streets and roads in the U.S. fell to the lowest level since 2003, according to the Federal Highway Administration. The annual total dipped below 3 trillion miles after first crossing that threshold in 2006. Travel in the month of December dipped a modest 1.6 percent, saving about 5 billion gallons of gas.
The cause of the decline has been hypothesized to be some combination of high gas prices for most of the year, millions of people getting fired from their jobs, and a fuzzy sense that we’re undergoing a cultural shift away from car-centric lifestyles. (It would have began on or around December 2007.)
A few specifics from the report:
- In the month of December all of the largest declines in miles were in the Pacific Northwest, with Oregon falling 15 percent and Washinton 11 percent. But that had more to do with snowstorms than it did with anything else.
- In the northeastern US, which had benign weather, December travel was actually up marginally over 2007 levels.
- The declines were, not surprisingly, most dramatic in June when gas prices were highest.
- It seems reasonable to think that without the crummy economy the number of miles driven nationally in December would have been back on trend.
With this in mind, gas prices and the recession seem to be driving the action much more than any cultural evolution, real or imagined.
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