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September Driving 2.25% More Than in 2019

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Americans drove 2.2 percent more miles in September 2024 than they did in the same month of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. September driving in rural areas was 7.9 percent greater but driving in urban areas was 0.2 percent less in 2024 than in 2019.

Amtrak has yet to release its September results, possibly because September is the last month of its fiscal year and it wants to get the year-end results right. When it does, I’ll post an update here.

Meanwhile, I discovered that I accidentally left the greenhouse gas emissions from some electric transit lines off of the enhanced spreadsheet I prepared of the 2023 National Transit Database. In going through the data, I also discovered some duplicate entries, which I deleted. If you downloaded my spreadsheet, which summarizes the 25-spreadsheet database into one worksheet, please download the corrected version now.

August Driving Nearly 103% of Pre-Pandemic Miles

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Americans drove 102.7 percent as many miles in August of 2024 as in the same month of 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Moreover, this is the first month I can remember since the pandemic began that driving exceeded pre-pandemic numbers on all types of roads, including urban and rural interstates, other arterials, and other roads.

For a discussion of Amtrak and airline data, see this post. For a discussion of transit data, see this post.

August 2024 driving was greater than 2019 driving in 28 states, while it was less in 22 states plus DC. DC driving was slightly less than 80 percent of 2019 miles, and miles of driving were also particularly low in Delaware (82%), Hawaii (84%), West Virginia (86%), and Massachusetts (88%). Continue reading →

July Driving 99.2% of 2019

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Americans drove 99.2 percent as many miles in July 2024 as the same month in 2019, according to data published by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. This is one of the few times that monthly highway traffic data have been released before transit ridership data.

July transit data are not yet available.

Except in April 2024, when driving dipped below 94 percent of pre-pandemic levels, miles of driving have been 99 percent to 103 percent every month for the last year. As usual, rural driving was more: 3.5 percent above 2019, while urban driving was 2.8 percent less than in 2019. However, driving on urban interstates grew 1.4 percent.

June Driving 1.2 Percent Above 2019

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Americans drove 1.2 percent more miles in June of 2024 than the same month before the pandemic, according to traffic data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Rural driving was up 7.4 percent while urban driving was 1.8 percent short of 2019 levels. Urban driving may be slow to catch up to pre-pandemic levels due to people working at home but in all probability is mostly due to the migration of the most mobile people away from certain urban areas.

See the August 8 post for a discussion of transit and flying and last Tuesday’s post for a discussion of Amtrak.

Even with those changes, June urban driving in Colorado was 16.5 percent greater in 2024 than 2019. It was also greater in Nevada (15%), Utah (15%), Arkansas (12%), New Mexico (12%), and Texas (11%). Michigan, Missouri, and Nebraska saw 8 percent more urban driving and a total of 23 states all saw more urban driving in 2024 than 2019. Continue reading →

Driving, Air Travel Surge Above Pre-COVID Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans took 7.7 percent more airline trips in May 2024 than the same month in 2019, according to TSA passenger counts. While the release of airline passenger-mile data lags other data by a couple of months, March data indicate that domestic flying passenger-miles were 5.5 percent greater than in 2019 while international passenger-miles were 1.5 percent short of 2019. The number of international trips was 4.3 percent greater than in 2019, indicating that people who are traveling internationally are going to closer destinations.

Americans also drove 2.6 percent more miles in May 2024 than May 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Highway Administration. Rural miles of driving were 8.8 percent greater than before the pandemic while urban miles were just 0.2 percent short of May 2019. Continue reading →

Mid-Day Traffic Now Worse Than AM Rush Hour

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Morning and afternoon rush-hour traffic has returned to pre-pandemic levels in many U.S. urban areas, according to INRIX’s 2023 Global Traffic Scorecard. However, what INRIX finds most “astonishing” is that mid-day traffic has grown by an average of 23 percent and is now much greater than during the morning rush hour, and almost as great at around noon as the afternoon rush hour.

U.S. Trips by Start Hour in 2019 and 2023

This will only be astonishing to people who haven’t read the several research studies finding that people who work at home drive more miles per day than people commute who work. As the above chart indicates, morning rush-hour traffic in U.S. urban areas is down 12 percent while afternoon rush-hour traffic is down 9 percent; but total traffic is up because of the 23 percent increase in mid-day traffic. Continue reading →

April 2024 Driving 6.3% Less Than April 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 6.3 percent fewer miles in April of 2024 than the same month of 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. This is the first time in nine months that miles of driving have fallen below 99 percent of the same months in 2019.

April driving was also 4.2 percent less than in March 2024. In “normal” years, such as 2018 and 2019, Americans have driven more miles in April than March despite the former having one fewer day, probably because of better weather in April. Continue reading →

March Driving 101.4% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove almost 1.5 percent more miles in March of 2024 than in the March before the pandemic, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Miles of driving have been at least 100 percent of 2019 numbers in six of the last eight months and at least 99 percent in 28 of the last 36 months.

Rural driving was 9.1 percent greater than in 2019 while urban driving was 1.8 percent less. The states with the biggest growth in driving are Indiana (33.8%), Montana (25.2%), Louisiana (23.0%), Arizona (17.0%), Idaho (16.6%), and Rhode Island (13.7%). The District of Columbia also saw 16.2 percent more driving in March 2024 than in 2019. Continue reading →

February Driving Up 2.3 Percent from 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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After accounting for Leap Day, Americans drove almost 2.3 percent more miles per day in February 2024 than in the same month of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration on Friday. Rural driving was 9.7 percent more than before the pandemic while urban driving was 0.8 percent less. At least some of these differences are due to people moving from urban to rural areas.

The February 2024 line for driving is obscured by the line for Amtrak, but both are approximately 102 percent.

While Amtrak, air travel, and driving have all fully recovered from the pandemic, transit has not. When I posted February 2024 transit data last week, someone commented that “Some areas have nearly recovered” while “areas like the Bay Area drag the data down.” It’s true that a handful of areas have recovered, in many cases because they are giving away transit rides for free. But most have not, unless you define 80 percent as “nearly recovered.” As of last week’s February data, out of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, only 2 have fully recovered and only three more saw 90 percent of pre-pandemic ridership. Continue reading →

2022 Highway Subsidies Were 1¢/Passenger-Mile

By | | Transportation
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U.S. highways, roads, and streets received a little over $65 billion worth of subsidies in 2022, according to data recently released by the Federal Highway Administration. Apportioning these subsidies to passengers and freight, they work out to about 1.0¢ per passenger-mile and 0.7¢ per ton-mile. For comparison, subsidies to transit averaged $2.39 per passenger-mile while subsidies to Amtrak averaged about 40¢ per passenger-mile.

The Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed yesterday due to being struck by a ship. If this had happened before 2021, it is likely that some lobby groups would have blamed the collapse on poor maintenance. Such claims led Congress to give the Federal Highway Administration an additional $90 billion, to be spent over six years, in the 2021 infrastructure law.

I calculated the highway subsidy numbers from the Federal Highway Administration’s latest edition of Highway Statistics. The agency once published this report as a book but now issues it as a series of spreadsheets. Earlier this month, I reported on spreadsheets showing the volume of traffic carried on the highways, but the financial spreadsheets were not yet available. Now they are. Continue reading →