FHWA Gleefully Declares That Driving Is Up, Calls for More Highway Spending

Despite the rhetoric, FHWA's own charts show that driving is hardly bouncing back to peak levels. Image: ##http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring/14juntvt/figure1.cfm##FHWA##
Despite the rhetoric, FHWA’s own charts show that driving is hardly bouncing back to peak levels — even if you’re just looking at total miles-driven. Chart: FHWA

Well, so much for the predictions that changing preferences and new technologies will lead to a car-free utopia. The Federal Highway Administration announced last week that after nine years of steady decline, vehicle-miles-traveled in the U.S. was 1.4 percent higher this June than last June. Apparently, red-blooded Americans everywhere are finally getting back to their Hummer habit after a few years of diminished driving and rising transit ridership and bike commuting.

Except one thing: Driving is still way down from peak levels. While the FHWA’s press release trumpets that “American driving between July 2013 and June 2014 is at levels not seen since 2008” — adding, alarmingly, a call for “greater investment in highways” — that’s not the whole story. Yes, the total driving rate now approximates where it stood in 2008, when VMT was in freefall. But it’s still way down from the peak — 3.05 trillion miles — in 2007.

Since the end of the recession, total VMT has fluctuated within a fairly constrained range, remaining well below the 2007 peak. And that’s just total driving. If you look at the per capita driving rate, it’s still dropping. In fact, it’s as low as it’s been in nearly 17 years.

In the FHWA press release, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx rejoiced, “More people driving means our economy is picking up speed.” But Foxx should know that although GDP and per capita VMT grew together for decades, they’ve uncoupled in recent years, especially as the economy recovered from the recession and driving rates kept dropping.

Foxx followed that dubious line with a push to “increase our investment in transportation” by passing the president’s $302 billion GROW AMERICA Act. But as Shane Phillips writes at Better Institutions, “their motivations are misguided”:

Although the bill is a positive step forward in the national transportation policy debate — emphasizing highway repair, transit investment, and increased local control of transportation funds — Americans should be skeptical of any suggestion that spending more money on accommodating cars will do anything to ease their commutes. We’ve been doing that for decades, and even though VMT has been stagnant and per-capita VMT has steadily and consistently declined, we’ve got virtually nothing to show for it.

Plus, as Tony Dutzik of the Frontier Group said in an email: “If rising VMT, according to the FHWA, fuels ‘calls for greater investment in highways,’ then, by the same logic, falling VMT would result in reduced need for investment in highways. Right? Yet, I can’t recall FHWA ever making that argument. And we have continued to plow money into highway expansion over the last decade.”

Perhaps Doug Short of Investing.com put it best: “As we can readily see, the post-recession pattern suggests a structural change in our driving habits” — despite the FHWA’s gleeful declaration that Americans have returned to happy motoring.

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

FHWA Gleefully Reports That Driving Is Rising Again

By Angie Schmitt |
After flatlining for nearly a decade, the mileage driven by Americans is rising once again. That means more traffic overwhelming city streets, slowing down buses, and spewing pollutants into the air. But to the Federal Highway Administration, it’s a development to report with barely contained glee. This June, Americans drove 8.7 billion more miles than last June, […]

The Feds Quietly Acknowledge the Driving Boom Is Over

By Phineas Baxandall |
The Federal Highway Administration has very quietly acknowledged that the driving boom is over. After many years of aggressively and inaccurately claiming that Americans would likely begin a new era of rapid driving growth, the agency’s more recent forecast finally recognizes that the protracted post-World War II era has given way to a different paradigm. […]

Putting the Recent Uptick in Driving in Perspective

By Angie Schmitt |
With gas prices plummeting and employment figures rising, America’s per capita driving rate increased in 2014 for the first time in nearly a decade. But experts warn driving is far from back to its previous historical pattern. According to new data from the Federal Highway Administration, total driving mileage climbed 1.7 percent in 2014, higher than […]

Americans Are Driving Less, But Road Expansion Is Accelerating

By Angie Schmitt |
Americans drive fewer miles today than in 2005, but since that time the nation has built 317,000 lane-miles of new roads — or about 40,000 miles per year. Maybe that helps explain why America’s infrastructure is falling apart. The new data on road construction comes from the Federal Highway Administration and reached our attention via Tony Dutzik at the Frontier […]

Transpo Agencies Are Terrible at Predicting Traffic Levels

By Angie Schmitt |
Americans’ travel behavior is changing dramatically. It seems like not a week passes without a new report about the decline in driving. But are state and local transportation agencies — which are responsible for much of the nation’s highway and transportation planning — keeping up with the facts on the ground? A review of the evidence […]