For months now, we’ve been tracking the fact that vehicle travel in the Northwest—both in general, and on specific urban highways—has been surprisingly flat for years, even decades.
One of the most common reactions to this news has been: well, duh, there’s a recession on. A few folks have argued that once the recession lifts we’ll see vehicle travel resume its steady ascent.
I think that misses the point of what we’re finding. The slowdown in vehicle travel started long, long before the current recession began. In fact, it started back when the economy appeared to be humming along quite nicely....
I’ll leave it to some future PhD student to figure out precisely what caused the shift in VMT trends in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I have lots of theories:
Major urban highways hitting capacity constraints;
Increases in gas prices, coupled with a growing belief that gas prices wouldn’t ever hit the lows of the late 1990s again;
Demographic changes, with more senior citizens and smaller families leading to less driving per person;
Land use shifts that let more people walk, bike, or take shorter, chained car trips for daily errands;
Possibly, declines in new road construction;
An increase in flexible work schedules, with more people working from home on some days;
The internet cutting back on shopping and/or work trips;
Cultural shifts that substituted tech toys for cars as objects of desire; and
Economic shifts, with fewer teens working (or looking for work) and widening income disparities that made it hard for some folks to pay for cars and gas.
http://daily.sightline.org/2011/08/08/d ... irca-2002/