Driving down 15.5 billion miles

Similar to 2004 numbers

David Crossley, Aug 29, 11.

Whether they’ve switched to car pools, public transportation, or maybe just walking, Americans drove 15.5 billion fewer miles in the first six months of 2011 than the first half of 2010, according to a story in Automobile magazine.

According to the US Department of Transportation, Americans drove 3.8 billion fewer miles in June 2011 versus a year prior.

That puts the nation’s year-to-date total at 1,452.7 billion vehicle miles of travel. In the month of June, that number was 259.1 billion vehicle miles. The DOT numbers are collected by compiling hourly traffic volume data from 4000 locations across the country.

The numbers also reveal that vehicle travel was down year-over-year in April, May, and June 2011. In fact, that last time that Americans drove so few miles in the first half of the year was 2004, when we covered 1,450 billion miles.