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
Part of the reason for miles going down is the Internet. People telecommute more, order stuff online (regular deliveries by USPS or UPS are more efficient than a zillion people heading to the mall), take care of bureaucratic stuff online, etc. I haven’t had to go to a government office in years, while ten years ago I’d have to go at least twice a month or so - I do all this sort of thing online nowadays.
We still drive cars to go to work and to buy groceries, but we only put about 20K miles a year combined on two cars, with about 15K put on by my wife as a small business broker. In the 1990s, I’d routinely run up 25K miles in a year by myself.
Given this, I can’t help but wonder if the best “transportation infrastructure” for the buck is superfast internet for all.
When the spike in gasoline hit during the summer, it seemed so severe for some people that they drove less while cutting back on other items for the gas they did have to buy. Oil was considered a major threat to our economy.
The lowering of recent gas prices have given many people a new sense of economic security in which they seem to have forgotten the $4.00 a gallon price just four or five months ago. In my area, you would hardy see a Hummer on the road back then, now they are popping up everywhere again, more and more everyday. It is like drivers parked them in a garage waiting for them to be affordable to drive again.
It is the same with our local utility companies. They kept the larger Ford F550 work trucks and other big vehicles in the parking fence and limited their use in the summer and early fall. Now the trucks are gone during the day showing they are being used again. It is a water company in Florida so there may be other factors than just fleet fueling costs, but I am sure it did have something to do with their budgets and fleet plans.
Most concerning of less driving, while we do need to do so, is the majority mindset that has totally forgotten about alternative fueling sources, smaller vehicles, and other transportation forms. The talk around the water cooler, the local coffee shop, and the lobby at church was about the new technology being created for fueling our cars and trucks to get us off of imported oil and gasoline in general. Today, many of these same people I come in contact with say they have other things to be concerned about since they can “afford” gas again at $1.65 a gallon than the Pickens Plan, batteries for cars, or giving up size and comfort of a larger vehicle.
It seems that as American’s more forward, we seem to forget about the past. It reminds me of the 1980’s all over again when my father went from driving less during the oil shortage to buying hot rod sportscars that drank fuel like a jogger drinking water. What a shame……..
I don’t know, guys. I think this is a permanent shift because there are other deeper, soul-searching issues taking place, as well. With the recent debaucle involving bailouts for Wall Street and the Auto Big-Three, and the thousands of lay-offs, many average Americans are reassessing what is really important. I tried to avoid being anecdotal, but I can point to three of my friends, one who is married with children, who are either thinking of going carless or are getting rid of one of their family cars. Now, two of them had fiscal reasons. The third, however, is in a situation where her and her husband have decent jobs, but they just don’t feel it necessary to own two cars anymore. In fact, the husband catches the express bus to work now, the last I heard. If the economy does improve, you will always have that stubborn percentage who will return to their old ways, but I think a large majority of us will continue to live a different sort of lifestyle than we did before this crisis. Also, if the economy does improve, I get the feeling that it won’t “improve” in the way we might think. People will have and regain jobs, but these jobs are going to pay way less (particularly in the financial services industry) and will require way more flexibility from employees AND employers. And to go further off-topic, the way we view “success” is going to radically change. I volunteer with elementary-age school children, and their outlook on the world seems just so much more practical and realistic than it did when I was their age. It’s fascinating.