At the dawn of the automobile age, America took the motor vehicle, made it its own and shaped it into something that has influenced transportation the world over for the last century. There’s no doubt about it, Americans are car people. But a University of Michigan study published this month reports that, by several measures, light-duty vehicle driving miles in the United States peaked in 2004, before the economic downturn.
“If those rates had peaked in 2008, there wouldn’t be a story,” said Michael Sivak, a research professor at the school’s Transportation Research Institute. “But it happened four years before that.”
The measures of light-duty distances driven per person, per registered vehicle, per licensed driver and per household — compiled from federal data — all reached peaks in 2004, and had declined 5 percent to 9 percent by 2011, the Michigan study says. Vehicle miles traveled by the entire American light-duty fleet peaked later, in 2006, at around 2.8 trillion miles — but still before the recession that shook the auto industry. In 2011, the most recent year available, that number had fallen to 2.6 trillion miles.
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