In January, US motorists logged a total of 222 billion road miles. That’s 7 billion fewer–about 3% less–than in January 2008.
Ohio saw a stunning 10 percent drop in vehicle miles traveled, whereas the western U.S. showed a fractional rise.
Some of this regional variation tends to be weather related, but the overall dynamic is clear and seems to be primarily related to the recession. After all, taking 600,000 or so commuters off the road month after month really adds up.
As we’ve learned recently, even very small reductions in miles driven can have outsized effects in reducing traffic congestion, which is a good thing for everyone. But the big question remains whether there is a structural element to all this–might Americans continue to drive less, even after (if?) the economy recovers?
There’s some reason to hope they will.
While there’s not much supporting evidence yet, it’s also not to hard to come up with an argument for why it could happen: consumption is falling and in percentage terms probably won’t ever return to it’s recent norms (Paul Volcker, among others, endorses this idea.) Ultimately that means few shopping trips, fewer car purchases, and fewer vacations. Automobile ownership rates will probably decline a bit, and transit use will probably keep ticking upward. Together with some form of VMT tax or congestion pricing in years ahead, that could (theoretically, anyway) be enough to keep Americans’ road mileage below recent highs.
If true, what does this mean? Probably that we should be thinking less about building new roads than repairing our current ones and improving our transit networks.
March 24th, 2009 at 10:16 am
[...] Driving Declined in January for 14th Straight Month (Infrastructurist) [...]
March 24th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Why do we hope people drive more again? Don’t people care about pollution and global warming? This should be celebrated and we should continue to promote the development of alternative transportation. We always talk about “changing your light bulbs to flourescent will remove 60,000 cars off the road”. Thus, isn’t driving less a good thing? We need to focus on developing walkable areas so people get healthier and are involved in their communities. The cars keep us isolated from other human interaction.
March 24th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
[...] are driving less [...]
March 24th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
LAofAnaheim -
A couple thoughts:
I suspect a solid majority of Americans now agree that driving less is better. The key point is that nobody wants that to happen because 600,000 more people each month are sitting at home on their couches watching the Price Is Right and eating Fiddle Faddle instead of commuting to work. It’s like losing weight because you have some terrible disease — the good is kind of outweighed by the bad.
(Ryan Avent speaks to this point well in a post from yesterday.)
Additionally, Americans still log 98% of their travel in cars. So there are probably limited rewards in trying to label them as inherently bad.
-Jebediah
March 29th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
“As we’ve learned recently, even very small reductions in miles driven can have outsized effects in reducing traffic congestion, which is a good thing for everyone.”
So you want to punish other people for driving, in the interest of reducing traffic congestion?
I don’t like heavy traffic either. I am in SoCal and it is no picnic here. But that doesn’t give me the right to try to control anybody else’s freedom of movement.
April 6th, 2009 at 10:31 am
[...] we learned (and kept learning), that Americans are driving less. Then we found out that traffic congestion is down a whopping 30 [...]
May 7th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
[...] we’ve speculated about on this site recently–maybe there is some kind of cultural shift at work [...]