Americans drove 2.7 percent more miles in December 2021 than in December 2019, according to the latest traffic volume data published by the Federal Highway Administration last Friday. According to these data, December was the seventh month in a row that driving exceeded driving in the same month in 2019.
This is a revision from previous reports because the Federal Highway Administration revised the national miles-traveled for December 2019 (shown on page 2 of the report). The preliminary estimate in 2019 was that Americans drove 273.8 billion vehicle miles in December. In 2020, this was revised downwards to 272.2 billion. But this report, for 2021, revised the December 2019 miles downwards even more to 261.8 billion.
While both the 2019 and 2020 reports broke the December 2019 number down by states and by urban and rural, the 2021 report only shows December 2020 and 2021 data by states and urban and rural. Thus, we can’t accurately compare state-by-state 2021 driving with driving before the pandemic.
Unlike previous charts I’ve shown in this series, the above chart is based on the most recent revisions to all monthly numbers. The December 2021 number is still preliminary and may be revised, but these revisions are usually less than 1 percent. There is also no consistency about the direction of the revisions: over the last three years, about a third have been upwards, a third downwards, and a third weren’t revised. The December 2019 number was unusual in that the downwards revision was more than 4 percent, which was enough to make the 2021 number more, rather than less, than the 2019 number.
I’ve also revised the air travel numbers for the above chart. In previous charts, I used TSA passenger counts, which didn’t distinguish between domestic and international travelers. I recently located passenger-mile data broken down by domestic and international air travel. Domestic air travel, which is shown in the above chart, recovered from the pandemic faster than international travel. Unfortunately, the passenger-mile data for December 2021 won’t be posted for several more weeks, so I estimated the December number based on the change in TSA passenger counts.
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The above chart is based on passenger-miles for air and Amtrak but vehicle-miles for driving and ridership for transit. Vehicle-miles should track with passenger-miles if the pandemic didn’t lead to a change in average auto occupancies. Ridership won’t track with passenger-miles because the modes of transit with the longest trips–commuter rail and commuter bus–were the ones that declined the most, so transit’s recovery in passenger-miles will probably be a little slower than shown in the chart.
Before the pandemic, automobiles provided about 81 percent of motorized travel, the airlines were 12 percent, and transit and Amtrak together were less than 1 percent. The remaining 6 percent, according to the Department of Transportation, was non-transit buses, if you believe DOT data.
However, there are good reasons not to believe DOT bus numbers. Based on vehicle counts and DOT assumptions that a certain percentage of those vehicles are buses, the DOT estimates that buses carried people 362 billion passenger-miles in 2019. Of this, we know 18.5 billion were on transit buses, about 64 billion were in motor coaches used for intercity buses, charter buses, and sightseeing buses, and about 50 billion were school buses. That leaves airport shuttles, but they cannot possibly have carried 229.5 billion passenger-miles.
If DOT estimates of the percentage of vehicles that were buses are reduced, then the number of other kinds of vehicles would increase, and that mainly means automobiles. There would be no increase in transit, Amtrak, or air travel, so the auto’s share of travel would increase.
The pandemic has increased the importance of automobiles at the expense of everything else. At the very least, autos will be 83.5 percent, airlines will drop from just above to just below 12 percent, non-transit buses will be about 4 percent, and Amtrak and transit together will be about 0.6 percent. Again, if you don’t believe the DOT bus numbers, then auto’s share of travel will be even higher.
