Study: Declining Driving Rates Not Merely a Byproduct of Recession

Evidence suggests that declining per capita driving rates in recent years cannot be dismissed as a temporary byproduct of the Great Recession, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund found in a study released Thursday.

Since it is clear the United States’ six-decade “driving boom” is over, policymakers should prioritize investments in rapidly expanding modes of transportation such as public transit and intercity rail and should dedicate highway funds to repairs and maintenance rather than to highway construction and expansion, the report suggests.

For 60 years, driving rates increased nearly every year, but per capita vehicle miles traveled peaked in 2004 and had fallen 7.4% by the end of 2012.

The VMT decline has been a factor in the issues facing the Highway Trust Fund, a pool of federal money used to support highways and other surface-transportation projects. Disbursements from the fund to state and local governments are sometimes used to back bonds known as Garvees or grant anticipation revenue vehicles.

Most of the trust fund’s net revenue has come from fuel taxes. But the economic downturn, changing driving patterns and increased vehicle fuel efficiency have caused the HTF to need transfers from the federal government’s general fund over the past several years to maintain solvency.

The trust fund is expected to become insolvent in fiscal year 2015 without congressional action.

“Given the severe limitations in transportation funding, every dollar that could be saved by not investing in an unnecessary highway expansion is a dollar that could repair aging bridges or enhance other modes of travel with growing usage, such as public transit and biking,” the study said.

Between 2005 to 2011, the most recent year for which confirmed state-by-state data from the Federal Highway Administration is available, driving per capita declined in 43 states and the District of Columbia. In three other states, driving rates increased slightly but remained below their peaks, the study found.

Although the economy has had a significant impact on driving trends, it’s not the sole factor. Some economic changes that contributed to the decline in driving, such as rising gasoline prices, are not likely to be temporary, the report said.

The study gave four reasons to be skeptical that the driving boom’s end is simply a temporary byproduct of the recession.

First, per capita driving began to decline years before the recession officially started in December 2007 and has continued to stagnate or decline since the recession officially ended in June 2009. In earlier recessions, driving rates did not fall below their pre-recession levels or quickly recovered.

Second, other indications of motorization — such as the number of vehicles per licensed driver and the percentage of young people with a driver’s license — peaked before the recession.

Third, driving per person declined among both those who were and were not employed.

In another section of the paper, the study’s author notes that there is practically no relationship between how much unemployment increased in a state and how much driving declined. If economic effects associated with unemployment drove the decline in driving, larger unemployment increases would correspond to larger decreases in driving. In fact, a majority of states with above-average increases in their unemployment rates had below-average declines in per-capita VMT.

The fourth reason to doubt that changing driving patterns are simply a result of the recession is that the gross domestic product and the volume of driving stopped being tightly connected around the beginning of the 2000s, the report said.

The study found very little correlation between increases in statewide urbanization and declining VMT per capita. It also did not find a strong correlation between changes in states’ percentages of workers working from home and changes in per capita driving since the end of the driving boom.

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