Gas prices
Average gallon of unleaded in GA
2005 $2.19
2006 $2.47
2007 $2.69
2008 $3.23
2009 $2.21
2010 $2.67
2011 $3.43
2012 $3.49
2013 so far $3.33
Source: AAA
Overall Atlanta-area miles driven, freeways and arterials. (Per-capita miles driven decreased every year.)
1988 43,705,000
2005 94,200,000
2006 92,685,000
2007 92,630,000
2008 88,500,000
2009 88,235,000
2010 89,999,000
2011 89,484,000
Source: Urban Mobility/TTI
Economy Peak: Dec. 2007
Bottoms out: June 2009
Source: National Bureau of Economic Research
Traffic is light; can you feel it?
Believe it or not, Atlanta drivers have it easy, researchers say, at least compared to 2005.
A national report released last week adds to a growing body of evidence of something nearly inconceivable to car-bound Atlantans. Not only has driving failed to increase with the economy’s recovery; it’s falling more.
No one knows for sure what’s going on. The suspects are legion: high gas prices; teleworking; a recession so bad it left psychic scars, or a recovery just weak on jobs.
Or, some go so far to believe, a shift in culture away from cars.
Many drivers, stuck in their stifling commutes, hardly believe it’s happening at all.
“I so disagree,” said Jan Lauten of Roswell, who commutes I-285 and surface streets. “I do it every day, five days a week, and that is not true.”
“It gets worse every year,” echoed Esther Mitchell, of Dacula.
But both Lauten and Mitchell are part of the trend. In recent years they changed their routines slightly in ways that reduced their miles on the road — in Lauten’s case to avoid congestion and in Mitchell’s to save on gas.
The big question: Is the trend permanent? Or if some invisible glitch gets unstuck, will traffic come flooding back?
The Decline
An Oregon economist, Joe Cortright, suggests a fundamental cultural shift is under way. He believes Americans and even Atlantans, initially prompted by high gas prices, are reconsidering the car.
“The decline that we’re seeing in driving has nothing to do with the recession,” Cortright maintains. “In fact, the recession is over and driving is continuing to decline.”
When Cortright compared U.S. miles driven per capita over all the past five recession periods (lumping the 1980 and 1981-1982 recessions into one), the trends showed a clear history. When the economy recovered, driving rebounded too. More commuters and more shipments meant more road miles logged. Always.
Except now.
A national congestion study, Urban Mobility, released by the Texas Transportation Institute last week, shows the driving decline is marked even in car-crazy Atlanta.
In the Atlanta urban area, since the report started tracking driving 30 years ago, overall miles driven on highways and arterial streets rose every year. Then in 2005, driving suddenly plateaued, then started to decline.
Driving per person fell every year after 2004. Overall driving, except blips upward right after the recession, has generally declined since 2005, according to the Texas report, which ends at 2011. More recent congestion data from the traffic information firm INRIX generally shows a decline.
But the number of workers in the region has increased each of the past two years, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission. So where did those commuters go?
The Alternatives
Brian Carr, spokesman for the Clean Air Campaign, thinks a lot of them are sitting in their homes teleworking. The campaign works to get metro Atlantans to drive less, and he says as of last count in 2010 336,000 people in the region teleworked at least one day a week, an increase from 2007 when 297,000 did.
“We’ve got a very wired region,” he said. He points out that during the recession Apple has gone from the original iPhone release to iPhone 5.
Technology is just one facet of a new, less car-oriented set of lifestyle shifts, Cortright believes.
Especially for young people, “there’s a lot more interest in urban living,” where people drive shorter distances, walk and take mass transit, Cortright said.
Esther Mitchell, the Dacula resident, can see that. She commutes to the Perimeter area for her work as an insurance sales director, and if she could afford to sell her house, she’d move closer to a transit station, she said. In the meantime, she runs errands more efficiently, waiting till the weekend to hit the dry cleaner and the shopping mall all in one trip. Though the recession is over, she keeps doing it, she said, because the dire economy left her with a changed mindset.
For the average commuter, Cortright believes the change starts with money — a reaction to high gas prices — and morphs into a lifestyle. He acknowledges the gas-price connection isn’t perfect. In 2009, for example, Georgia gas prices went down, but Atlanta-area driving went down too.
But the trend is longer-term than that, he says, a matter of big choices like buying a house closer to town, or finding a new job closer to home.
For young people, he says, a trend toward more urban, less car-centric living is already embedded. Decades ago, he notes, the hot sitcoms showcased suburbanites. “For people who’ve grown up in the last 20 years,” he said, “it’s ‘Friends.’ ”
Young, creative people increasingly prefer urban life, Cortright’s research says. They can connect on Facebook rather than drive to the mall.
A much smaller portion of young Americans are applying for driver’s licenses than 30 years ago, according to the University of Michigan. In 1983, 87.3 percent of 19-year-olds had a driver’s license. In 2010, it was 69.5 percent.
But it’s not just the young, Cortright says.
For Judith Small-Benn-Wright of Lawrenceville, technology was just one part of her scaled-back driving.
During the recession, as her employer cut back her paycheck she cut down on driving to save gas and maintenance money, chaining together errands to reach the same places but drive less. Then she made a bigger change, switching to a church closer by.
But now the economy’s better, her paycheck’s back — and she’s driving even less. Last year, she chose to start teleworking.
“It saves on gas. It saves on the road rage,” said Small-Benn-Wright, an auditor for a state agency.
Gas prices are down since then, but she’s still teleworking. She just likes it.
Not So Fast
Not everyone is sure there’s big permanent change afoot, especially in Atlanta.
“Culture shift was the first thing that came to my mind too,” concedes Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University’s Robinson College of Business. “But what is the one activity that has not recovered? There is one clear activity that has not recovered: construction.” Construction is a driving-heavy industry, he notes, and the timing coincides better with Atlanta’s 2006 driving drop-off. He agrees a lot of factors are likely at work. But carpenters can’t telework. If construction comes back, Dhawan says, just wait for the traffic.
And guess what people who sell cars have to say.
“I don’t think there’s any evidence at all that America’s lost its love of the automobile,” said David Hyatt, vice president of public affairs for the National Automobile Dealers Association. A more important measure, he says, is car sales.
They tanked during the recession, endangering the auto industry’s survival. Now they’re back strong and, Hyatt says, leading the recovery. “By 2014, economists are projecting that the new car sales total may set a record surpassing even the previous high.”
Mike Smitka, an auto industry economist, is also “dubious” about the notion of a culture change, saying the lifestyle change would be too great. “In the car industry there isn’t any sense of people talking about this as an issue going forward,” Smitka said.
It may depend on which car industry.
ZipCar and Hertz are angling for drivers to leave their full-time cars behind and rent a car instead at drop-spots for quick occasional driving, said Alec Gutierrez, senior market analyst at Kelley Blue Book.
“We look back in the past and everyone was thinking what future transportation would look like, and everyone was thinking flying cars and outlandish things that never came to fruition,” Gutierrez said. “But now webinars, Skype, virtual conference calls, people able to work from home, living in urban areas; people are valuing that as a part of their lifestyle.”
And that’s nothing compared to the future, he believes, as Google and other companies work to develop driverless cars.
“Imagine that - you can sign up for a program,” he theorizes. “A car drops you off” - cheaper because there’s no driver to pay - “and goes on to pick up the next client.”
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