Well, the results are in. The U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT), Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), Office of Highway Policy Information (OHPI) released its Traffic Volume Trends: December 2024 report. The report doesn’t just provide traffic trend information for the 12th month of last year, but data for the entire year as well as for all years dating all the way back to 1999: 26 years in all.
Twenty-twenty-four’s driving topped them all with a grand total of 3,279,079,000,000 (3.279079 trillion) miles driven. That’s up 1.0 percent from 2023’s number which itself tipped the scales at 3,246,817,000,000 (3.246817 trillion) miles driven, up by 32.3 billion miles.
It is at this point that I always like to ask the question of what’s going on or, in other words, why are all the additional miles being driven? Are there more people driving? Are there more people doing more driving? Are there fewer people driving that are driving longer distances? Like I said, just what is going on here?
We shouldn’t be so much concerned with all of the driving as we should the makeup of vehicles on the road logging all of that mileage; that is, if we’re looking at all this either from an air-quality or pollutant-emissions-reduction-from-the-motor-vehicles-sector standpoint. What is the relationship of straight internal-combustion-engine (ICE) -powered motor vehicles motoring on America’s roadways versus those that can be classified as either zero-emissions vehicles (ZEVs) or partial zero-emissions vehicles (PZEVs)? Is the gap between the two separate categories growing, narrowing or remaining constant? If the gap is getting smaller, then the amount of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions that motor vehicles are emitting into the atmosphere are become fewer, comparatively speaking. Another question I would ask is: Are the ICE cars, light trucks and SUVs rolling off the miles themselves gradually becoming cleaner and greener? Also, it is helpful to know how workers returning to the office to work is impacting driving. Are more and more using alternative modes (of travel), as would be the case with greater dependency on public transit (bus and train) and/or on active modes (of travel) as in their relying more on bicycling and walking. Each and all of these factors need to be taken into consideration.
Oh, and there’s one more thing. The presumptions are that the more miles being driven translates into either more road-maintenance work being necessitated, that, or more roadway pavement being added to, well, add capacity where none had previously existed. And, perhaps the last consideration to take into account: Is roadway travel slowing down, speeding up or remaining constant? If the first, this suggests that roadways are experiencing more traffic congestion which means more delay being encountered, translating in more drivers spending more time behind the wheel per trip and could possibly mean more pollutant- and greenhouse gas emissions being pumped into air contributed from transportation. There’s much to take into consideration here: content to be explored, if you’ll pardon the pun, farther down the road.
For more information, see: Traffic Volume Trends: December 2024 report here.
Above and corresponding, connected home-page-featured images: U.S. Census Bureau/Wikimedia Commons
— Alan Kandel
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