Report: America’s Love Affair With Cars is Ending
According to a just-released report from the well-respected Brookings Institution, the US is experiencing its longest and quickest decline in the amount of driving since World War Two — a decline which the report’s authors claim marks a permanent shift away from the automobile and towards other forms of transportation.
The report, The Road… Less Traveled: An Analysis of Vehicle Miles Traveled Trends in the U.S., points out that the beginning of the current decline in driving predated the high gas prices of last summer and, as gas prices have come back down over the last few months, drivers are not going back to their cars (click the graph below for an expanded view of these statistics).
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As Robert Puentes, co-author of the report says, “With important conversations underway on infrastructure spending as economic stimulus, it’s critical for the new Congress and administration to recognize the long-term implications of these travel trends and to use this as an occasion to put forth a new vision that reflects new realities and is not just more of the same.”
I’m excited that we finally seem to have realized we need to fix and expand our embarrassingly decrepit infrastructure here in the US, but I get worried when it seems like the majority of what we’re going to do is patch up existing roads and build new ones.
What if we did that and then 20 years from now people were driving half as much as they are even today? We would have wasted a ton of resources on the wrong thing.
In trying to tease out the reasons why the decline has been so steep and persistent even without the recent gas price pressure, the authors identify several:
- Market saturation of vehicle ownership
- A plateau in the number of women entering the workforce
- A possible ceiling in the amount of driving any one individual can tolerate
- Increased ridership on mass transit
- The development of commercial centers closer to home
- Rising unemployment
One result of such a precipituous drop in driving in the US is that revenues to repair and expand our transportation infrastructure have dried up. Most of those types of projects are funded from the various federal and state gas taxes, and with fewer drivers on the road driving less miles, those funds are at all-time lows.
According to Adie Tomer, the other report co-author, “As gas tax receipts plummet, we will have to get smarter about how we spend our transportation dollars. We cannot afford to build more roads that people simply will not use. We run the very real risk of severely misallocating scarce resources.”
I, for one, would gladly give up my daily car commute for a high speed train ride where I can surf the internet and listen to music. Who’s with me?
Image Credits: Road from Nicholas_T’s Flickr photostream under a Creative Commons License. Graph from report referred to in this post.
Source: Green Car Congress
Nick Chambers, You have to be careful what you write. The Republican party and corporate lobbyists are very powerful, and for the most part are just dying to kill alternative energy and transportation. Your last 2 articles gave them additional ammunition. That is what upsets me.
In “Love Affair” you wrote that maybe we don’t need to maintain our roads because in 20 years we might not be driving very much. That can be extrapolated to — why worry about conservation, or pollution control, or alternative energy, or global warming? Heck, cars are going away, right? Let’s just leave things “as is” and let nature take it’s course.
In “Upstart Chinese Car”, apparently you made a sarcastic remark about regulations. Okay, fine. I missed the joke. But just turn on Fox News or one of the many other conservative media outlets. They’ll gladly twist any remotely-relevant factoid to ridicule the changes you and I would like to see. Those guys LOVE YOU today.
This blog is decent as it stands. But if you want to improve it, do 3 things. Be more politically aware. Support your points with facts.
I don’t think people have fallen out of love with driving. That’s a broad generalization. Prior to this economic meltdown, the car modification industry was raking in millions, to the point that some automakers started selling their own mods (think Nismo, TRD, STI, etc.). There are countless movies and songs about cars. There are still weekly cruise nights around the country. Right or wrong, cars and driving are a big part of our culture.
People are certainly frustrated with traffic congestion, but plenty of people still enjoy a drive. I know I do, and I live in one of the most congested suburban areas in the country.
Hey Mark that sound outside your windows is not little black helicopters and I promise the Aliens are not coming to probe you. Enough with the wack job conspiracy theories already. Sorry to hurt your feelings, but the Illuminati is fake and Bush is not the anti-Christ. “They” are not sitting around reading random blogs in search of a way to stop all you do-gooders. I mean really wow!
Mark,
I still think you’re way off the mark.
#1 I’m not the author of the BYD post. I’m the editor of this whole site and therefore end up moderating some of the more inane comments.
#2 Look in the mirror. The same claims you make of “them” twisting what I say to their advantage, you yourself are doing with what I wrote. And you’re not the first. There have been many that have come and gone in the comments section like you from both sides of the extreme. I never said we don’t need to maintain our roads. I said we don’t want to allocate resources in the wrong place. Obviously as long as people are still driving we will need to maintain our roads, but perhaps we don’t need to make new ones or add additional lanes?
#3 Snarky comments about how I should “be more politically aware” and “support my points with facts” just make you look like more of a jerk. My point is supported by the facts in the report. This post is about that one report. There may be other information that contradicts that report, but I haven’t found it yet. When you do, and you feel like adding something constructive to this conversation, feel free. But until then, get your own house in order.
Tim Cleland, sorry, but the correlation of gas prices and efficiency has gone negative. We only see reductions in consumption due to forgone economic activity. We actually get less done with the same amount of fuel when gas prices go up, for several reason including some mentioned in the article:
1.People are at their limit of how much driving they will tolerate. This means we get giffen behavior when gas prices increase. People spend more time driving for work, when there’s lot’s of traffic, just to get ends to meet, and shift driving away from less congested times.
2. People have big misconceptions about what is efficient. Driving slower saves fuel, when your driving above 55mph. Below 40mph, driving faster is more efficient. Accelerating faster is about the same, or slightly more efficiency, than accelerating slowly. Typical car engines don’t see efficiency drop off until after 3000rpms.
3. Tragedy of the commons. About the most fuel efficient behavior you could adopt is avoiding braking. However, if you do this during congestion, you prevent cars from clearing into your queue and create more bottlenecks. Starting from a stop is the big gas waster. A stop can take 6 times more fuel than a rolling stop.
Ryan, unfortunately, when times are lean (which happens when gas prices are high) people return to more conservative dress and traditional work hours to compete for jobs.
It is unfortunate. Most organizational leaders are so focused on their selfishness and greed that they neglect their most valuable resource: humans.
Back on topic, it would be nice to at least have the option of safe, economical, mass transit.
Nick Chambers:
I don’t care if you think I’m a “jerk”, nor am I bothered by any of your other insults. I’ll simply point out that it is you who call names. Every comment from you on this site is an attack on someone with a dissenting opinion.
As editor you are responsible for choosing what gets printed on your site, as well as how that content is presented. I’ve done my job. I think now you’ll be more careful about spreading stories that are potentially harmful to your own goals.
I’ll leave you now. Apparently name calling is what passes for intelligent discourse. Over and out.
“The bulk of traffic are those thousands of suburbians sitting bumper to bumper for 2-3 hours each day as they go back and forth to work”
I hear that all the time but find it pretty difficult to believe. In the case of your example, until recently I lived in one of those outlying Dallas suburbs (Frisco). Nearly all of my neighbors worked at Legacy Business Park (about 3 miles away), the remainder somewhere outside 635, mostly north of the GBT. The situation is similar in the outlying burb I live in now - 40 miles from city center, I am not aware of a single neighbor who works more than 10 miles away except me, but I only go into the office once a week - and was when I lived on the west coast as well, leaving me very suspicious of the general criticisms of urban sprawl.
On the public transportation issue: the area I live in now has an outstanding rapid transit system that is grossly underutilized. I hear one massively expensive idea for increasing ridership after another, when one simple, relatively cheap (by mass transit standards anyway) measure would, I’m pretty sure, massively increase ridership in an instant: put a police officer on every car (the same was true of th DART rail system in Dallas, by the way). You will never get people to use public transit if they believe doing so puts them in danger.