Milestones: Transportation for a new generation

What if the world changed and nobody noticed?

For generations, traffic engineers, policymakers, the media and the public assumed that the number of miles Americans drive in their cars could only go in one direction: up.

This assumption drove the nation’s conversation around transportation policy. After all, if every passing year brought more cars to the roads, then maybe we had better add more highway capacity to match.

In the mid-2000s, something unexpected happened. The rate of growth in vehicle travel hit a speed bump.

Frontier Group’s Elizabeth Ridlington was one of the first to pick up on it. Elizabeth had spent years putting together state-level climate policy blueprints that depended on projections of future vehicle travel. In the late 2000s she noticed the forecasts made by state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) were increasingly diverging from what was actually happening on the roads. State DOTs kept forecasting big increases in vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) that never seemed to materialize.

Transportation for a new generation

One reason, it turned out, was that young people were driving less. In 2011, Frontier Group found that vehicle travel had fallen sharply among young people — a 23% per-capita decline between 2001 and 2009.

That seemed like a big deal. And yet virtually no one was talking about it.

In fact, from the U.S. Department of Transportation on down, the professionals whose job it was to anticipate future demand for transportation continued to tell the public and decision-makers that America would be getting back on the path to rapid growth in VMT any minute now.

The data also showed that our car-centric transportation system was making a major contribution to global warming. If driving was down, did we really want it to go back up?

Frontier Group started to factor changing trends in travel into our own analysis and writing as early as 2009. By 2012, Frontier Group researchers were ready to make the case – through a report entitled “Transportation and the New Generation” – that the decline in driving among young Americans had meaningful implications for the nation’s transportation future.

The report received media attention in The Washington Post, the Financial Times, The Economist and Car & Driver, on National Public Radio, and in media outlets across the country. It sparked earnest conversations among local and state policymakers around the country about whether and how transportation policy could better serve the emerging needs of young people.

Meanwhile, with partners including the State Smart Transportation Initiative, Frontier Group called attention to the wildly out-of-step VMT forecasts made by state and federal DOTs. A new generation of Americans might prefer less car-dominated lives — requiring policymakers and the public to have a different kind of conversation about our transportation future.

The conversation has changed

This conversation, finally, has started to change. The U.S. DOT has altered its methodology for making national VMT projections — and unsurprisingly, the new method forecasts more modest growth in VMT (an average of 1.2% annually over 20 years in projections made before COVID-19).

The idea that transit, bike lanes and improved pedestrian infrastructure are desirable options — for millennials and members of every generation — has taken firm root. And slowing the growth of vehicle travel has finally come to be seen as an essential strategy to address climate change.

The call for cleaner, more efficient, more sustainable transportation is being echoed more clearly and more strongly than at any time in recent history. And it’s not out of the realm of possibility to imagine that this time — maybe this time — leaders in Washington, D.C., and the states will recognize the changes taking place. And listen.

About this series: PIRG and The Public Interest Network have achieved much more than we can cover on this page. You can find more milestones of our work on research below. You can also explore an interactive timeline featuring more of our network’s research milestones.