No, U.S. Driving Has Not Hit an All-Time High

In posting the above chart, Brad Plumer at Vox writes that “peak car” was just a myth and that Americans are apparently driving more than ever. If you’re on the road to a Thanksgiving get together right now, that might seem like a reasonable conclusion. And indeed “vehicle miles traveled,” the primary metric for U.S. driving habits, has been on the rise—up 3.5 percent on the previous year, as of September.

But when you adjust VMT for the driving population, you get a very different picture. As it happens, Doug Short at Advisor Perspectives did just that last week. Turns out VMT per capita is on the way up in 2015 but remains a full 6 percent off the all-time peak hit in mid-2005. Instead of suggesting that Americans are driving more than ever, Short describes U.S. driving as being “about where we were as a nation in June of 1997.”