Abstract
After a century of almost continuous growth in vehicle travel in the U.S., the first decades of the 21st century saw vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per capita fall slightly, from 9,963 in 2003 to 9,937 in 2019. While some of the decline can be attributed to the Great Recession of 2007-2010, VMT did not fully rebound following the economic recovery. A much slower recovery from the recession among young people, more stringent driver’s licensing rules, rising preferences for dense urban living, high gas prices, an aging population, rising environmentalism, and the near saturation of vehicle ownership1 have all been proffered as possible explanations, but these don’t tell the whole story. In a new study, researchers at Clemson University and the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies suggest we may be seeing a fundamental change in the demand for out-of-home activities that drive vehicle travel. Using data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) collected between 2003 and 2019, the authors propose that the fundamental cause of declining per capita travel time is an underlying reduction in the demand for out-of-home activities, driven in part by spectacular advancements in information and communications technology
