There’s definitely some truth to the quote “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey,” but try telling that to someone stuck in traffic. Time spent traveling is time spent, well, not where you’re trying to go. With the average American adult traveling an average of 41 miles a day in 2023, that’s a lot of time on the move. And with 98% of miles traveled across the country traveled in an automobile, that’s a lot of driving, a lot of gas money, and a lot of CO2 emissions.
Today, we’re using Replica data to publish an interactive map of the average daily miles traveled by a resident of each county in the US, and the average number of miles traveled only via walking and biking in each county each day. We’re also taking a closer look at Michigan, with data broken down to individual census tracts, to demonstrate the detailed analysis that can be done at the local level when studying land use, access to transit, and active transportation infrastructure.
First, some nationwide trends:
- A Nation of Car Trips: Of the 10.7 billion miles traveled each day, 97.9%—10.5 billion miles—are traveled in a private automobile or transportation network company car, like Uber or Lyft.
- Active Transportation: Less than 1% of miles traveled are via active modes like walking or biking
- Public Transportation: only 1.2% of all miles traveled are via public transportation. Across the country’s 3,143 counties, in only 16 do public transit trips make up more than 5% of total mileage.
- Over / Under: 18 states have averages under the 41 mile national average, and 32 states have averages that are greater. But the states above and below the average each make up about 50% of the country's population.
- High / Low: New York and Hawaii sit on one end of the spectrum with just about 30 total daily miles per person per day. On the other end of the spectrum, residents in Mississippi average more than 55 miles a day and Vermont residents average 54.
Check out your home county as see how far residents in your area travel, and how that compares to counties around the country.
