Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About VMT Trends
Robert Puentes and Adie Tomer have a report out from Brookings that’s just chock full of data about “vehicle-miles traveled” trends in the United States with basically no policy prescriptions. Here’s one chart:
I think this shows that the short-term response of driving behavior to gas price increases is very small, because things are just located where they are. But the long term impact of sustained increases looks quite a bit greater, because over time businesses and individuals have the ability to change things up based on new expectations about fuel prices. It’s worth noting that this decline has taken place even in the absence of policies like congestion pricing, carbon pricing, and pay-as-you-drive car insurance all of which would create incentives for people to think harder about their VMTs. Even more remarkably, we haven’t seen much in terms of serious efforts to either legalize denser construction or to build serious new transit networks — the kind of things that would open up meaningful alternative ways of getting around.
41 Responses to “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About VMT Trends”
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December 16th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
What caused the sudden VMT drop in 2000?
December 16th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
I think the love affair with the car was peaking even before gas prices really shot through the roof. A few years ago I was in Atlanta for a wedding the topic that just about everybody brought up (including the minister in his remarks) was how bad traffic was and how everybody hates spending that much time in their cars every day. I think we might see a generational shift as the baby boomers start dying off. The Beach Boy generation can’t live without the suburbs and the psychological crutch of automobiles. Younger people are probably a lot more amenable to denser living, public transit, and so on than their parents were. At least city stories are in vogue again on TV. And everybody’s getting used to the idea that having a government do things is a pretty good idea sometimes.
I guess my point is that the times are ripe for some of these issues to come into their own. Matt! Keep spouting off about this! And get on TV if you can to talk about THESE issues. Infrastructure and land use have sat at the children’s table far too long. Timing is perfect.
December 16th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
The drop in the blue line would look less impressive if you started the vertical axis at 0 instead of 7,500.
December 16th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Isn’t the idea to reduce fuel and therefore oil consumption, not to reduce the ability of people to travel a lot? A more interesting analysis might be total oil/fuel consumption vs. population. I suspect it might show a relatively linear increase in oil consumption vs. population growth. Actually, oil consumption has declined more rapidly this year than mileage not driven, so oil consumption is more determined by economic activity. A depression will be great for our national oil consumption and carbon emissions!
December 16th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
What caused the sudden VMT drop in 2000?
I’m thinking the labelling is off and that should line up w/ 2001 (because the x axis on the graph seems to go past sep 08.). And if so, the drop is probably 9/11 (when the attacks and a sudden but temporary gas spike likely caused a bunch of people to cancel late summer early fall vacations)
Which also means that this: I think this shows that the short-term response of driving behavior to gas price increases is very small, is not very true – or at least, it depends what you mean by short term. Day to day, no. Month to month – yes. Morever, look at how the VMT flatlined with the first doubling (in real prices) sometime in late ‘05, and then jumped off a cliff when they doubled again. The premlinary reports (i think i saw on calc risk) shows that the Oct & Nov VMT are back up, the latter somewhat considerably considering the economy.
December 16th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
After glancing at the Brookings report, the only other thing I can think of for the prompt drop in the middle of the blue line is some kind of change in the denominator. Figure 1a (annualized VMT) shows no such discontinuity. (pretty much a steady rise from 1980 to 2004) But it also doesn’t make sense that a bunch of people showed up in 2001 (or 2000) but just didn’t drive (which would reduce the per capita VMT as shown in the figure above)
December 16th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
In mid-2000, there was a very sharp temporary price spike to over $3 per gallon in much of the country. That led candidate Al Gore to call for releasing oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve.
December 16th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
“Isn’t the idea to reduce fuel and therefore oil consumption, not to reduce the ability of people to travel a lot?”
Don’t be silly. The idea is to make people who already live in desirable places (such as Matt, who has spent his life living in Manhattan, Cambridge, and D.C.) even better off relative to people who don’t live in such desirable places.
December 16th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
I was incorrect in my recollection of the calculated risk posts.
This one:
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2008/12/dot-gasoline-demand-increases-in.html
said that Oct VMT are lower by 3.5 yoy from last Oct but up 7% from sept (the normal difference is typically 3%).
And this one:
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2008/12/oil-prices-cliff-diving.html
says at the end that overall gasoline consumption in Oct increased as well (the first such uptick in some time)
December 16th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Boy am i glad you are back from Finland. that shit was getting tiresome.
welcome home.
December 16th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
I’d say metros, or at least many of them, have gotten serious about building transit networks.
So maybe the federal government should step up then?
December 16th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
suppose people were driving a quarter or a third less than they currently do, on average. What would that do to willingness to spend for a vehicle? How would car styles and features change? For example, I don’t drive all that much (19K miles in the past 3 years), and while I don’t really have a lot of car (Subaru Legacy wagon), it’s more car than I really need, given how much I drive.
December 16th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Re: Which also means that this: I think this shows that the short-term response of driving behavior to gas price increases is very small, is not very true
There was some price-gouging on 9-11, but many states also threw the book at the gougers and prices returned to normal within a couple of days. it wasn’t prices that caused the abrupt drop in driving, but simply shock: people didn’t want to go anywhere. They were glued to their TVs and web browsers waiting for what might comes next.
Re: In mid-2000, there was a very sharp temporary price spike to over $3 per gallon in much of the country.
Where? California? Sure didn’t happen anywhere I lived. The first time I even saw $2 a gallon (in the US) was in 2004.
December 16th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
bdbd, I don’t know that it would have much effect on much they were willing to spend for any one purchase, but I’d wager they’d purchase less often.
Case in point: my AZ commute round trip was 50 miles. My HI commute round trip is 5 miles. I daresay my previous car would have been history years ago, rather than last February, had I stayed with the previous commute.
December 16th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
suppose people were driving a quarter or a third less than they currently do, on average. What would that do to willingness to spend for a vehicle?
If I my commute were much less of an issue, I’d probably start thinking about getting a sports car– because day-to-day reliability (some of those performance cars are tempermental) and monthly fuel costs would be much less of an issue than they are now. “Spend for a vehicle” includes all of the costs of owning and operating the vehicle, not just the up-front purchase costs.
December 16th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Lord Yglesias, didn’t you just take a trip from Washington DC to Helsinki, Finland?
That would be a round trip of 8,600 miles. Since you do not distinguish between a LDV such as a car, and an other vehicles, such as airplanes, I presume you traveled that distance in a vehicle
So you traveled about the equivalent of one average person’s yearly travel in one week. Maybe we should be looking at ways to cut that wasteful travel?
December 16th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Maybe we should be looking at ways to cut that wasteful travel?
I await the unveiling of your plan to turn Maryland into a Finnish colony.
December 17th, 2008 at 12:03 am
JimboSlice, as an exhaler of CO2, is a fucking hypocrite.
December 17th, 2008 at 2:23 am
I think some of this maybe permanent. For me, it is, so I’m obviously biased. But I have given up driving and now I ride the bus, ride my bicycle, or walk. It’s a different attitude and lifestyle. And I like it, it’s peaceful and calm. I have enough stress in my life, it’s nice not to have the stress of driving. I have the benefit of a good transit system, and I wish everyone else did too. But it’s nice to live without a car. Think of every asshole driver you’ve ever encountered. Now, think of them just going away…. Relax, and now you know how I deal with traffic. I just read a book and let the driver do his/her thing. Unfortunately, I then get to my stop and the real world comes back. But I still get some peace along the way.
December 17th, 2008 at 7:13 am
The ticks are labeled, not the gaps … follow the slant of the years up and to the right to get the tick that is labeled as the start of that year.
Which would put the steep drop at November 2000, except the source data is through to October, with Oct 2008 up there at the tick or in the last spot before the tick, so the steep drop is actually September or August 2000.
For that kind of month to month change, September 2000 would seem the most sensible place to look.
Long term elasticities in all products tend to be larger than short term elasticities, and looking at the diagram, it looks like $2.50/gallon is the level where ongoing factors promoting increase in VMT/capita begins to be offset by efforts to reduce the cost of private transport.
December 17th, 2008 at 9:55 am
There should be two time constants involved. One nearly instant, representing changes of habit, the other a few years, representing changes in vehicles, house location, job location, business practices etc.
December 17th, 2008 at 10:03 am
And it would look like an instantaneous spike up to 10000 if he started the plot at 13 billion BC. I think Matt is intentionally obfuscating just how much better off we are than the primal energy of the universe was.
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