WHAT DRIVING DATA MEAN AS TEXAS PLANS FOR TRANSIT
Are Americans driving more, or less? Yes. The answer to this matters because, on a macro level, it is an indicator about how transportation officials should spend our money. Historically, federal, state, city and county transportation departments have made their decisions based — and I’m simplifying here — on population. More people, more roads (most of the time) or, in some cases, more mass transit.
But what if the link between population and driving growth has been broken, or at least frayed?
This was certainly the argument advanced by a good number of advocacy groups — the ones inclined more toward spending on transit, bike and pedestrian facilities — when federal estimates of total vehicle miles driven dipped in 2008, 2009 and 2010. And then, after a couple more years of slight growth, “vehicles miles traveled” in the U.S. in 2013 again slid (slightly, by less than 0.02 percent).
And at this same time, some statistics also indicated that young people, as measured by their inclination to sign up for driver’s licenses, were turning away from driving.
The only problem with all this was that 2008, that first year of the decrease in miles driving, had a double whammy: $4 a gallon gas for the first eight months, then the beginnings of the Great Recession in September. And of course 2009 and 2010 were recession years as well. Perhaps people, and truckers in particular, were driving less because they didn’t have jobs to commute to, or as many goods to carry.
So where are we now with driving, given that we are well on the other side of that recession?
According to data from the Federal Highway Administration, which tracks vehicle miles traveled, driving has tracked up for the past three years (using July to June numbers) by 0.8 percent in 2013-14, 2.8 percent in 2014-15 and 3.4 percent in 2015-16. The current rolling 12-month total was 3.18 trillion miles, admittedly the kind of obese number that is hard to get your mind around.
How about this: That’s about 9,800 miles for every woman, man and child in the country. The gain since that last dip three years ago: about 650 miles per person per year.
But, on the other hand, that gain is less than 2 miles a day for each person. At city speed, about four more minutes in a car each day. That sounds pretty modest.
And if you look back a ways, and use the relevant population figures, here’s what the numbers say. In 1991, each person in the United States (again,
counting all 253 million people at the time, the babies and all, plus commercial traffic), traveled 23.3 miles per day on average. In this most recent count, with about 325 million Americans, the count was 26.8 miles per day.
So, yes, we’re driving more, per capita, than we were a quarter century ago, about 15 percent more.
Bear in mind, this is occurring with historically low gas prices. Paying $2 a gallon for gas like we’re doing now equates to about 34 cents a gallon in 1971, the year I got out of high school.
That’s more or less what we were paying back then, and the gas station guy would clean your windshield and check the oil level and tire pressure for that price.
On the other hand — and there’s always another hand when you’re talking numbers and policy — young people do seem to be turning away from driving, or at least delaying it some.
According to data from the highway administration, in 1994, about 41.8 percent of 16-year-olds had a driver’s license. That figure climbed to 76 percent for 19-year-olds.
In 2014, the most recent year this statistic is available, the federal agency reported that 24.5 percent of 16 year olds had a license, down about 17 percentage points. Looking at 19 year olds, about 69 percent had driver’s licenses, a drop of about 7 percentage points over the past 20 years.
But there has been a notable ebbing among all Americans when it comes to driver’s licenses. In 1994, 88 percent of Americans who were eligible for a license had one. By 2014, that had fallen to 84.4 percent.
An interesting sidelight on this: You have heard, no doubt, that old saw about “Texans and their cars.” We love them dearly, this line of argument goes, more than other folks. Having lived in eight other states, I must tell you I never noticed a difference in the ardor.
But, according to those same federal stats, in 1994, 88.9 percent of driving-age Texans had a license, just above the national average. Now? We’re at 75.9 percent, 8.5 percentage points below the national average.
Vermonters, as just one example, are much more likely to have a license to drive. In fact, for every 100 Vermont residents old enough to drive in 2014, there were almost 105 licenses, which indicates either a big scandal or a whole lot of chilly people with commercial driver’s licenses.
Anyway, the point is, we are not on the road less per capita than we were a generation ago, or even three years ago. Maybe that will change with gas prices, or the economy, or autonomous vehicles, or more trains in urban landscapes (although a lot of light rail has been built since 1991 in U.S. cities.) Maybe it will trend down. But maybe not.
Austin voters will be asked in November to make a big investment in transportation: $720 million in bonds, with a good chunk of it for sidewalks, bikeways and transit.
On the other hand, the Texas Department of Transportation and the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority have been spending much bigger sums to build highways — well, mostly tollways — around here, including about $1.2 billion in ongoing projects to expand U.S. 183, Texas 71 and North MoPac Boulevard.
Maybe it is time to spend more on those alternative modes, given that increasing number of folks with no driver’s license in Texas.
But at the same time, it is almost certainly too early, especially given the grinding congestion around here, to write off the needs of that other 75.9 percent.