Per capita Vehicle Miles Traveled has been declining in L.A. since 20. Image via Rick Cole Twitter
Last week, Los Angeles City Deputy Mayor, and soon-to-be Santa Monica City Manager, Rick Cole tweeted out a graph showing that Angelenos are driving less than we used to. In 2002, the average city resident drove 11.9 miles each day. By 2013, that daily Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) has declined to about 10.8 miles each day. I asked Cole for the source of the graph, and his only response, tweeted, was that it's from an "L.A. City Planning Report." Which report is not clear.
What has caused this shift in 2002? L.A. Magazine suggests that L.A. "has invested heavily in bike and transit infrastructure. Protected bike lanes have opened across the city, along with parking for cycles and sharrows painted on streets." Curbed points to the changes having been "sped up" by the Measure R transportation sales tax.
I think it's more likely that the last 5 years of somewhat-improved bike and transit facilities are a response to this trend, not a cause of it. I think that city agencies, elected officials, and experts are beginning to catch up with trends that are already happening on our streets.
What's the cause? Anyone who says they know is probably wrong, but I will go ahead and speculate later, at the end of the article. First, a look at how L.A. compares to other places where the declining VMT trend has been observed.
Like Los Angeles, the national trend shows a declining per-capita driving for the past ten years.
After increasing fairly steeply for decades, the U.S. per-capita driving begins to climb less steeply in the 1990s, then begins to decline around 2002. Different studies put the peak and decline in slightly different places, but the national trend has definitely been downward for about a decade.
In the USA, per-capita drivng peaked about 2005 and has declined since. Image via Streetsblog USA
Vehicle Miles Traveled in California has been on the decline for a couple of years. Photo: ##http://www.peaktraffic.org/graphics/vmt-california.jpg##Peak Traffic##
In California, overall driving, not just per-person driving, has been in decline since 2007.
Nobody predicted this trend. Nobody.
Sadly, though we're at least a decade into declining per-person driving, very few transportation agencies and traffic engineers have incorporated these trends in their predictions of future car traffic. Engineers are still predicting that upticks, 1990s-style or 1970s-style, are right around the corner.
Traffic projections from Washington State, compared to actual trend. Image from Sightline Institute via Streetsblog.net
Only in late 2014 did some transportation agencies begun to the be honest and factual in their forecasts; see these graphs from Washington State.
Will this honesty-in-predicting reach California or Los Angeles someday, more than a dozen years into the current trend?
We'll see. Apparently there's a yet-to-be-released Planning Department report on the subject making the rounds with mayoral staff. That's a start. Dear City Planning Department, please cc: the Bureau of Engineering and LADOT.
So, my guess on some factors that may have contributed to L.A.'s VMT has declined recently: (see also Sightline's speculation here)
demographic shifts: baby boomers are retiring and driving less at the same time as millennials are living in cities and driving less
modal shifts: many people who used to drive to work now walk, bike, take transit, carpool or work at home
shorter trips: people aren't moving as far out into sprawling suburbs, so even ones who aren't shifting modes are at least driving shorter trips
fuel prices: the general upward trend in the price of gasoline discourages driving
actual limits of car-centric design: not sure how this would ever be proven, but I think that there are probably physical limits of how many cars that can be crammed into a given place, and that continued growth in VMT in these locations results in gridlock that can't be built-out-of at a reasonable cost
My hunch is that these and other factors have played out gradually over time to reduce the amount of driving we do. Readers, what do you think? Why are Angelenos driving fewer miles? What should we do about it?
Update on the status of the bike path on the RSR bridge; Santa Cruz transit about to get a lot better; Headstone could delay Metro expansion; Free transit on Clean Air Day (this Wednesday); More
L.A. County needs to embrace physically-protected bikeways, robust traffic calming around schools, and similarly transformative, safety-focused projects