http://www.esquire.com/features/data/nate-silver-car-culture-stats-0609
This is surely one of the signs of the apocalypse: Americans aren’t driving as much as they used to.
In January, according to statistics compiled by the Federal Highway Administration, Americans drove a collective 222 billion miles. That’s a lot of time spent behind the wheel — enough to make roughly eight hundred round-trips to Mars. It translates to about 727 miles traveled for every man, woman, and child in the country. But that figure was down about 4 percent from January 2008, when Americans averaged 757 miles of car travel per person. And this was no aberration: January 2009 was the fifteenth consecutive month in which the average American drove less than he had a year earlier.
This is, historically speaking, highly unusual behavior. If there have been two seemingly immutable trends for the American consumer, they’re that he’s eaten more every year and driven more every year. The late 1960s are sometimes assumed to be the height of car culture. But in January 1970, the average American drove only about 393 miles in his vehicle, or about half of what he drove every month until recently.
The one thing that has sometimes caused Americans to put on the brakes is higher gas prices. Although driving is a relatively inelastic activity — a doubling of gas prices reduces miles traveled by only a small fraction — it has nevertheless been somewhat sensitive to changes in fuel costs. Vehicle miles traveled fell between 1981 and 1982, for instance, when the price of gas was the equivalent of three dollars in today’s prices, and between 1990 and 1991, when the Persian Gulf war triggered a temporary spike in the price at the pump.