US DOT keeps overestimating future Vehicles Miles Traveled

[CHamilton]

Not just highways but all aspects of regional planning are dependent on traffic forecasts. That’s not to say that such plans are necessarily wrong, but clearly revised traffic reality needs to be reflected in all plans, not just highway building ones.

http://www.newgeography.com/content/004781-urbanists-need-face-full-implications-peak-car

 

[jis]

This has been a bit of a problem in the NY area and is at least mentioned privately by some at NYMTC. In order to pass the FTA grant threshold NJT for example dreamed up all sorts of numbers and made allowance to connect the Northern Line (now targeted for HBLRT use) to the tunnel even to cross the threshold! Meanwhile the recession hit, reducing all economic projections never to be recovered in some cases, and so went the trip projections. It should be interesting to see what numbers NYMTC comes up with in their latest documents and what numbers are used in NEC Future, and also in the PANYNJ Airport Expansion Plans. New highway lane miles in the New York Metro area is pretty much at a standstill. NJ is still adding highway lanes at various places, most notably on NJ Turnpike, which is probably not the worst thing they could do considering how many hours I have spent parked on that road near Jamesburg.

 

[CHamilton]

The Feds Quietly Acknowledge the Driving Boom Is Over

The Federal Highway Administration has very quietly acknowledged that the driving boom is over.


After many years of aggressively and inaccurately claiming that Americans would likely begin a new era of rapid driving growth, the agency’s more recent forecast finally recognizes that the protracted post-World War II era has given way to a different paradigm.

The new vision of the future suggests that driving per capita will essentially remain flat in the future.

 

[jis]

That projection might be a bit optimistic too, since it basically says that driving grow at the same rate as population, and that each individual on an average be driving the same amount as now. There is anecdotal evidence that as the baby boomers die off, or come of age when they get removed from the driving pool, that this per capita number will remain the same. But we'll see of course.

 

[Anderson]

The best estimate would probably go more or less with growth in line with population (i.e. flat VMT, which seems reasonable long-term), but with a weighting to account for the fact that older people don't drive much. Probably a staggered down-weight for those over 65/70, 75, and then 80 or 85 (this last group being weighted down to a limited amount of VMT being generated...mostly via either paratransit or other services for moving them around that involve someone else driving...but still resulting in a net generation of trips and VMT). I can see a logic for building in a modest rebound (on the assumption that the economy will improve sooner or later), but that should really be a one-time bump and nothing more.

 

[CHamilton]

The American decline in driving actually began way earlier than you think

I mentioned last week that car travel in America appears to have peaked backed in 2004. Since then, "vehicle miles traveled" per person in the U.S. have been falling or flat-lining, prompting a fascinating debate over whether we're witnessing some fundamental shift in the American relationship to the car, or some economic blip instead.
Timothy J. Garceau, a Ph.D. candidate in geography at the University of Connecticut, and professors Carol Atkinson-Palombo and Norman Garrick offer a different way to think about the answer. In research they presented this week at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board, they looked at travel data not at the national level, but by state instead.

 

[Anderson]

That's interesting, for sure...though in a sense there's nothing new in that data. Though a bunch of states peaked early, it seems like the ones that peaked later still managed to offset the earlier-peaking states for a long time.

 

[CHamilton]

Americans Are Driving Less, But Road Expansion Is Accelerating

 

[neroden]

Yes, there seems to be an inherent conflict of interest and a natural unwillingness to say "Hey, we're not going to need as many resources next year - please take some of our money and fire half of us".

True, though at some point it would behoove some of the elected officials being faced with wasteful projects and horribly misguided projections to start either re-directing money or, frankly, sending DOT secretaries in with a mission to clean up the mess.
I can sorta give them a pass for the first few years of this, but a decade should be long enough to at least start slowing the growth projections.

...especially since, in most states, the "Department of Highways" was renamed "Department of Transportation" back in the 1970s, so as to include railroads and ships and planes as well as roads.

And *railroad demand is booming*. So the Department of Transportation could always spend the money on giant railroad projects instead.

 

[CHamilton]

Another angle on this issue.

Have We Reached Peak Car?

 

[Anderson]

The answer is "probably". One thing that only hit me (thanks to that article) is how much increasing VMT probably connected with increasing average highway speeds (note that a good part of the increase can probably be connected to the construction of suburban freeways, particularly as the core of the IHS was completed).

 

[CHamilton]

US drivers travel record 3 trillion miles in 2015

U.S. drivers traveled a record 3 trillion miles on the nation's roads and highways in 2015, according to statistics from the Department of Transportation.

The agency said Monday it has calculated there were 2.88 trillion miles traveled between January and November of 2015, which each month showing an increase between 2.5 and 4.9 percent over the previous year's corresponding month.

The agency said that the number of vehicle miles traveled would top 3.1 trillion if December's figures, which have not yet been calculated, remain even with last year's numbers.