The release of the December 2024 edition of Traffic Volume Trends by the Federal Highway Administration this week shows that total driving on U.S. roads, measured by vehicle miles-traveled (VMT), rose 1.0 percent in 2024 above the prior year. Americans drove 3.279 trillion vehicle-miles, an increase of 32.3 billion miles.

The most important thing to remember is that a 1.0 percent growth rate is part of a post-COVID reversion back to the historical norm. From the big oil price increase in 2004 through the pre-COVID year 2019, U.S. VMT grew, on average, 0.8 percent per year. This was far below the 4.5 percent annual growth average from 1951-1978 or the 2.5 percent annual growth average from 1979-2003. (The Iranian revolution in early 1979 was the prompting factor for driver behavior change then.)

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the amount of driving grew so rapidly each year that Highway Trust Fund receipts would grow significantly most years without tax rate increases. Even as cars got more fuel efficient and the growth rate of driving dropped in the 1980s and 1990s, that underlying growth rate still meant that the gas tax increases needed to keep pace with inflation were not large.

But now, at 1 percent per year growth (and the official FHWA forecast is lower than that), even if Thanos were to snap his fingers and install a national VMT monitoring system in each existing car and truck tomorrow, eliminating the gas tax in favor of a mileage fee, that revenue source would not grow as fast as inflation.

But the amount of growth is still enough that, in 2024, the total amount of VMT finally exceeded the pre-COVID amount driven in 2019. 3.279 trillion is 101 percent of 2019’s 3.262 trillion. (U.S. mass transit ridership, on the other hand, still has not recovered from COVID. The preliminary 2024 total is 7.581 billion unlinked person trips (UPT), which is just 77 percent of the 2019 total of 9.910 billion. But transit ridership peaked back in 2014, at 10.711 billion UPT, and was slowly declining even pre-COVID.)

The total amount driven each  year is the result of billions of choices made by hundreds of millions of individuals. At an individual level, using Census Bureau annual July 1 population estimates, VMT per capita in 2024 did not grow at all – 9,641 miles per person in 2024 versus 9,640 miles per person in 2023.

A look at the per capita VMT chart going back to 1950 makes things more clear – American driving peaked in 2004, at 10,117 miles per capita. The per capita rate then dropped steadily for eight years, then increased fitfully by an average of 0.7 percent per year until COVID, and is now flat again.

While there has been a discrepancy between urban and rural VMT growth rates in recent years, that disparity was not present in 2024, when according to TVT, total driving on both rural and urban roads grew 1.0 percent from the year before. The percentage of total VMT that took place on urban roads stayed the same at 68.9 percent.