Often my colleagues based outside the USA express amazement at the number of miles Americans rack up on our roads: some 3.3 trillion annually, of which about 2.7 trillion are via personal vehicles (not goods transport, typically via trucks). That works out to about 15,000 miles of personal travel per year per driver, and as the average household has more than one driver, we can call it 25,000 miles annually per household1.
My friends’ reaction to these figures ranges from the dismayed (“You’re killing the planet!”) to the incredulous (“No one can drive that much!”) to the annoyed (“It’s behavior like this that holds back mass transit!”). They’re not wrong for holding these views, but their exasperation doesn’t provide much explanation as to why we drive as we do.
There are plenty of theories about this, from the conspiratorial (“The Detroit automakers bought up metropolitan trolley lines just to close them down, and boost driving in cars!”2) to the geographic (our wide-open spaces made the American Dream of a suburban house and lawn - derided as “sprawl” by critics - feasible, and along with it, lots of driving necessary) to the economic (America had by the 1950s become so wealthy that consumers could afford to shun mass transit, with its crowding and other issues, for personal cars). These are probably all true to some extent, and there are more (“It’s Big Oil’s fault!”), but I have no definitive answer.
I do, however, want to flag one, um, driver of driving in America, which helps me understand more fully just how embedded in our culture driving is3. You may laugh, but I’m going to talk about sports, specifically participatory (versus spectator) sports, and how they influence car usage in the USA.
Taking it from the top: we have about 330 million people. About 75 million of these are children, defined as age 18 and under. Of these about 60 million participate in some kind of sports during the year4, and of those about 45 million participate in sports at least one day a week.5 (As an aside, it costs the average family about $900 per year to keep one child in one high-participation sport, when one adds up equipment, training, camps, league registration fees… and travel.6 )
And this high level of participation demands high amounts of travel: to the ball field for baseball, to the stadium for football, to the school gym for basketball, and to the pool for swimming. The question then is, how much travel? This is not well researched as far as I can tell, but an excellent paper by K. S. Bunds, M. A. Kanters, et al., at North Carolina State University helps us guesstimate an answer. They signed up about 150 families with kids enrolled in a competitive (a 47-week season!) swimming league, to report on their travel patterns. Here are the averages reported:
Source: Organized youth sports and commuting behavior: The environmental impact of decentralized community sport facilities, Kyle S. Bunds, Michael A. Kanters, et al. 2018. (Okay, it’s not my coolest chart ever!)
Check those numbers carefully. An average of 6.5 (round) trips per week, 50 miles per week. This comes to 2,500 miles a year, more or less, which is 10% of the average family’s total annual mileage in America. And this is just for the one sport: if the family has another child or children in another sport, the numbers go higher. (And of course lower, to the extent a child is enrolled in a less-intensive league.) The authors estimated that for this sample in this North Carolina location, sports-related driving was more like 25% of the family total.7
To demand of such parents that they ridehail or bus their way to these locations is wildly unrealistic, and not just because we’ve inherited a poor public transit system: the car is an ideal multi-function “Swiss Army knife” for these kinds of trips. It does, pretty well, everything the harried parent needs:
carries the budding athlete back and forth, of course
enables dragging along the younger sibling in a car seat, who can not be left at home alone
provides a place to stash the skates, sticks, balls, and uniforms
isolates one’s sweaty and dirty offspring from other people
and easily makes the linked stops these trips often entail feasible (Burger King on the way home, and don’t forget to drop off fellow swimmer Larry at his house)
Participation in sports is ingrained in American culture, and such participation requires a lot of travel. The family car is ideal for this task, and this reality encourages families to retain ownership of, and drive into the ground, the car. “Mobility” enthusiasts tend to overlook this use case when hypothesizing the replacement of cars with bikes or scooters or buses - what works for commuting does not work as well for getting Jane to her hockey practice8
Now I do realize that many families around the globe do make a carless situation work for kids’ sports. (Though I will insert here a wiseass remark that if all you ever do is play soccer, well you just need a ball and an open field, and so the task is maybe less demanding?) But I cannot imagine that it is easier to do it that way.
This post may come across as not very serious, but I assure you, from an American perspective, the personal car’s enablement of participatory youth sports is a use case that influences millions of vehicle purchases annually here, and makes those purchases harder to displace with “mobility solutions.”
Note that “household” is not the same as “family,” and the number of active “drivers” is not the same as the number of “driver’s licenses,” etc., etc. Tabulating all these data is mostly the work of the government, whether through specialized agencies such as the Federal Highway Administration or generalist bureaus such as the Census. And the numbers can be “squishy,” as some miles are self-reported and others pulled from vehicle registration documents, etc. I will therefore not claim rigorous precision in my calculations here, but I think my figures are good enough to prove my main point.
A theory now mostly debunked, see the Wikipedia article on “The General Motors streetcar conspiracy” — or just watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Seriously.
I sometimes joke that on the back of the Bill of Rights, drafted in 1789, is written in pencil “And also, everyone gets a car. Or two.”
National Council of Youth Sports data
Sports and Fitness Industry Association data
Aspen Institute & Utah State University research
As always, any misinterpretation of the authors’ results is my own fault, not theirs.
At 5 AM in a rink 30 miles away, because you can never get a good ice time!