Is more road capacity really needed?
June 9th, 2011Evidence continues to mount suggesting that the seemingly inexorable trend of ever-increasing travel on U.S. roads is faltering.
As we noted earlier here, VMT for 2011 are now down 0.1% from last year and are still well below the pre-recession peak reached in 2008.
Truck traffic on U.S. roads is down, too. The Ceridian-UCLA Pulse of Commerce Index, based on real-time diesel fuel consumption data for over the road trucking, fell 0.9% on a seasonally and workday adjusted basis in May, after falling 0.5% in April. The index has now declined in four of the first five months of 2011, and in eight of the past twelve months. As seen in this chart posted at Calculated Risk, truck traffic remains well below pre-recession levels.
Based on an estimate from Autodata Corp, light vehicle sales were at a 11.79 million SAAR (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in May. That is down 10.2% from the sales rate last month (April 2011), although up 1.5% from May 2010. Again, Calculated Risk has posted a great chart showing U.S. light vehicle sales since 1967.
U.S. light vehicle sales remain at levels last seen about 20 years ago, when the population of the U.S. was 50+ million less than it is today – and there were 35 million fewer licensed drivers, as seen by comparing statistics here and here.
The number of cars and light trucks on U.S. roads appears to be falling, as the number of light vehicles scrapped is substantially outnumbering new vehicle registrations. The overall scrappage rate in the U.S. is about 6.1%. There are about 238,000,000 passenger vehicles in the U.S. (BTS data as of 2008 – the most recent data available – not counting motorcycles or trucks with more than four wheels). With the U.S. scrappage rate at 6.1%, about 14.5 million vehicles are being removed from U.S. roads each year.
The U.S. appears to have entered a new paradigm when it comes to oil consumption, as seen in this chart posted at Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis.
As seen in this chart at the U.S. Energy Information Administration website, U.S. oil consumption peaked in 2005.
In 2005, the U.S. burned through 20,802,000 barrels of oil per day. The rate of consumption fell to 18,771,000 b/d in 2009, then rose a bit to 19,148,000 b/d in 2010. Oil consumption in 2011 is faltering again, and is now behind the pace set in 2010.
Maybe it’s not so smart to be squandering billions on new road and bridge projects?