Recent Streetsblog USA posts about VMT

Court: Don’t Spend Billions on Outdated Travel Forecasts

By Joe Cortright | Aug 11, 2016 | 2 Comments

Cross-posted from City Observatory. Last week, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., has ordered new ridership projections for the proposed Purple Line light rail line, which will connect a series of Maryland suburbs. Like any multi-billion dollar project that serves a densely settled metropolitan area—and this one connects some […]

4 Ways Road Builders Game the Numbers to Justify Highways

By Angie Schmitt | Jun 23, 2016 | 15 Comments

The people who make the case for highways often present themselves as unbiased technicians, simply providing evidence to an audience subject to irrational bias. But traffic forecasting is not a neutral, dispassionate exercise. It is subject to all sorts of incentives, beliefs, and assumptions that can skew the results in a particular direction. Intentionally or not, forecasters frequently exaggerate predicted […]

The Feds Aren’t Crowing About the Record Amount of Driving in America

By Angie Schmitt | Jan 26, 2016 | 4 Comments

Gas is cheap again, and cumulatively, Americans are driving a record amount. Newly released U.S. DOT data shows that through the end of November, Americans drove a cumulative 2.88 trillion miles last year, well above the same period in 2014, indicating that 2015 will set a new national record for driving mileage. Adjusting for population growth, driving is still about […]

Planning for Less Driving, Not More, Would Lead to Big Savings

By Angie Schmitt | Nov 23, 2015 | 10 Comments

What if, instead of basing policy around the presumption that people will drive more every year, transportation agencies started making decisions to reduce the volume of driving? And what if they succeed? A new report from the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group quantifies what would happen in that state if driving rates come in one percentage point lower than the state […]

Why Creating Meaningful Transportation Change Is So Hard

By Daniel Hertz | Oct 21, 2015 | 8 Comments

Cross-posted from City Observatory. At his blog, The Transport Politic, Yonah Freemark pushed back this week on the idea that we’re seeing a revolution in the way people get around cities and suburbs, largely thanks to new transit-and-bike-friendly Millennials. In fact, he cites one of City Observatory’s posts as an example of a narrative he doesn’t […]

The End of Peak Driving?

By Joe Cortright | Oct 7, 2015 | 16 Comments

Cross-posted from City Observatory. A little over a year ago, a gallon of regular gasoline cost $3.70. Since then, that price has plummeted, and remains more than a dollar cheaper than it was through most of 2014. Over the same period, there’s been a small but noticeable uptick in driving in the US. After nearly […]

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