According to the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, car ownership in the US has dropped steadily in recent years.
The study was spearheaded by university researcher Michael Sivak, who concluded that both car ownership and miles driven have declined per person as well as per household since peaking over a decade ago, as reported by Cars.
The peak was back in 2006 when there were approximately 2.05 cars per household. After that, there was a steady decline for the next seven years, where that number dropped to 1.927.
After the recession, car ownership per person & household rebounded by an average of 1.4% from 2013-2015, however that’s still more along the lines of how things were over two decades ago (circa 1993), than how they stood during the 2006 peak.
As for miles driven, those peaked at 9,314 (14,989 km) back in 2004 on a per person basis, then declined through 2013, dropping by 9.1% to reach 8,462 miles (13,618 km). Miles driven per household also peaked in 2004, at 24,349 (39,186 km), and ignoring a slight growth in 2010, they declined by 10.2% by the year 2013.
While the UMTRI study doesn’t go as far as to say what the cause of this decline might have been, it’s likely that it’s related in one way or another to the recession of the late 2000s.
“Recent studies have shown that – per person, per driver and per household – we now have fewer light-duty vehicles, we drive each of them less, and we consume less fuel than in the past,” stated Sivak. “These trends suggest that motorization in the U.S. might have reached a peak several years ago.”
