Daily Passenger Travel

In their daily nonoccupational travel, people in the United States journeyed about 4 trillion miles in 2001, or 14,500 miles per person per year, according to results from the 2001 National Household Travel Survey (box 5-A). On average, people traveled 40 miles per day, 88 percent of it (35 miles) in a personal vehicle¹ such as an automobile (figure 5-1). The total number of vehicle-miles for this passenger travel in 2001 was nearly 2.3 trillion.²

Americans took 411 billion daily trips annually, or an average of 1,500 trips per person per year. On a daily basis, individuals averaged about four trips per day [1] (figure 5-2).

Source

1. U.S. Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics and Federal Highway Administration, 2001 National Household Travel Survey, Preliminary Data Release Version 1 (day trip data only), available at http://nhts.ornl.gov/, as of January 2003.

¹ Personal vehicles are cars, vans, sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks, other trucks, recreational vehicles (not including watercraft), and motorcycles.

² For more extensive daily (mostly local) travel data and analysis, see section 5 (pages 50–57) of the Transportation Statistics Annual Report, October 2003.