Per capita travel in the United States was a little lower in 2021 than 2019, according to data recently released by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS). In 2021, the average American traveled 17,909 miles by air, auto, transit, and Amtrak, down 8 percent from 19,475 miles in 2019.
Photo by Ken Kistler.
To calculate that number, however, I had to correct an error in the recently released spreadsheet, which says that domestic airlines carried 172.8 billion passenger-miles in 2021, just 23 percent of the 754.5 billion miles they carried in 2019. This is an obvious typo, as another BTS table says that domestic airline flights carried 571.8 billion passenger-miles. (To view passenger-miles on that web site, click on “Revenue Passenger-Miles” at the top of the table.) Continue reading
