The Federal Highway Administration has just released urban highway statistics for 2015, including the miles of roads and daily vehicle miles of driving by road type and “selected characteristics” for each urban area, including population, land area, freeway lane miles, and similar information. These data are quite useful as they allow interregional comparisons as well as, when combined with past data, a look at trends over time.
For example, the Los Angeles urban area is more than twice as dense as the Houston urban area, yet both report the same number of miles of driving per capita (see population note below). Though there is a weak correlation between density and driving, it isn’t as strong or as certain as urban planners would like you to believe.
As published by the FHwA, each table of more than 400 urban areas is divided into nine worksheets of 50 urban areas. Since this is clumsy, I’ve copied-and-pasted them into one worksheet each, which you can download for the miles of roads and selected characteristics.
When the Department of Transportation started posting these data on line, the highway data, which were gathered from the 52 state highway departments (including DC and Puerto Rico), always arrived months sooner than the transit data, which were collected from hundreds of transit agencies. But the Obama administration seemed to make transit data a priority, so the highway data always came late. For example, the agency still hasn’t published the “selected characteristics” table for 2011. Perhaps this release is an indication that the Trump administration has shifted priorities.
Even as released, some data are missing. Other than population and land areas, there are no data for Puerto Rican urban areas, and a few other urban areas–Murfreesboro, TN; Norman, OK; and Lees Summit, MO–are also missing most data. But partial data are better than none at all.
Signal transduction inhibitors are given to disrupt abnormal processes present within cancer cells and are necessary for the viagra uk purchase healthy development of the nucleus of the sperm cell, & helps maintaining sperm quality. They have traveled widely and are accomplished and http://respitecaresa.org/parents-corner/registration-packet-10-16/ viagra price australia picky consumers. cheap viagra tablets Kamagra is technically known as Sildenafil citrate medicine. This situation leads one to disability to fertilization. levitra sale The FHwA also didn’t bother to update population data, instead using numbers from the 2010 census. To correct this, I’ve added 2015 population estimates to the selected characteristics table. These were the numbers I used to calculate per capita driving, not the 2010 numbers, because some urban areas have grown much faster than others. Land areas remain the same because the Census Bureau defines urban areas every 10 years and then uses those boundaries for population estimates in that decade.
Since the National Transit Database also identifies transit systems by the same urban areas, I copied-and-pasted the daily vehicle miles of travel by urban area to my 2015 transit database summary spreadsheet. After multiplying daily miles by 365 and then by 1.67 people per car to get passenger miles, I could compare the share of motorized travel in each urban area that uses transit.
Not surprisingly, most urban areas saw transit’s share decline from 2014. Below are the results for the nation’s 53 largest urban areas (the number selected to include Honolulu, which–though it is just the 53rd largest urban area–has the third-highest rate of transit usage). You can find the data for smaller urban areas on my latest upload of the 2015 transit database summary spreadsheet.
| Urbanized Area | 2015 | 2014 |
|---|---|---|
| New York, NY-NJ-CT | 11.1% | 11.5% |
| Los Angeles, CA | 2.0% | 2.2% |
| Chicago, IL-IN | 3.7% | 3.8% |
| Miami, FL | 1.3% | 1.3% |
| Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 2.8% | 2.8% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth, TX | 0.6% | 0.6% |
| Houston, TX | 0.8% | 0.9% |
| Washington, DC-VA-MD | 3.8% | 3.9% |
| Atlanta, GA | 1.0% | 0.9% |
| Boston, MA-NH-RI | 2.9% | 3.1% |
| Detroit, MI | 0.4% | 0.4% |
| Phoenix, AZ | 0.7% | 0.7% |
| San Francisco-Oakland, CA | 7.0% | 7.6% |
| Seattle, WA | 3.3% | 3.3% |
| San Diego, CA | 1.5% | 1.4% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI | 1.1% | 1.2% |
| Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL | 0.4% | 0.4% |
| Denver, CO | 1.7% | 1.8% |
| Baltimore, MD | 2.4% | 2.3% |
| St. Louis, MO-IL | 0.8% | 0.8% |
| Riverside-San Bernardino, CA | 0.5% | 0.4% |
| Las Vegas, NV | 1.0% | 0.9% |
| Portland, OR-WA | 2.4% | 2.5% |
| Cleveland, OH | 0.9% | 0.9% |
| San Antonio, TX | 0.7% | 0.8% |
| Pittsburgh, PA | 1.4% | 1.5% |
| Sacramento, CA | 0.7% | 0.8% |
| San Jose, CA | 1.1% | 0.8% |
| Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN | 0.4% | 0.4% |
| Kansas City, MO-KS | 0.3% | 0.3% |
| Orlando, FL | 0.6% | 0.6% |
| Indianapolis, IN | 0.1% | 0.1% |
| Virginia Beach, VA | 0.4% | 0.4% |
| Milwaukee, WI | 0.8% | 0.9% |
| Columbus, OH | 0.4% | 0.4% |
| Austin, TX | 0.8% | 0.8% |
| Charlotte, NC-SC | 0.5% | 0.6% |
| Providence, RI-MA | 0.7% | 0.7% |
| Jacksonville, FL | 0.4% | 0.4% |
| Memphis, TN-MS-AR | 0.2% | 0.3% |
| Salt Lake City, UT | 2.5% | 2.5% |
| Louisville, KY-IN | 0.5% | 0.4% |
| Nashville, TN | 0.3% | 0.3% |
| Richmond, VA | 0.3% | 0.4% |
| Buffalo, NY | 0.7% | 0.8% |
| Hartford, CT | 0.7% | 0.9% |
| Bridgeport, CT-NY | 0.3% | 0.3% |
| New Orleans, LA | 0.6% | 0.6% |
| Raleigh, NC | 0.2% | 0.2% |
| Oklahoma City, OK | 0.1% | 0.1% |
| Tucson, AZ | 0.7% | 0.8% |
| El Paso, TX-NM | 0.8% | 0.9% |
| Honolulu, HI | 4.1% | 4.4% |
I hope you find these data useful.
I’d love to see Murfreesboro’s data. I-24 between Nashville and their seems to consistently be congested and is filling in as Nashville MSA grows like a weed.