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"  Credit: flickr / brewbooks It&amp;#039;s a story that makes sense: After the recession began in 2008 fewer Americans could afford the costs of owning and driving a car, leading to a drop in car ownership and driving rates in the U.S. Yet America&amp;#039;s economic funk may have only exacerbated trends that already existed, says transportation researcher Michael Sivak of the University of Michigan. According to Sivak&amp;#039;s research, many stats suggest that the country&amp;#039;s love affair with the car\u2014or at least the total amount we drive\u2014peaked in 2004, four full years before the economic downturn. Sivak&amp;#039;s findings come in two studies published this summer, and it was the second one, released this week, that contains the telling data. He found that four key stats\u2014the number of miles driver per person in the U.S., miles driven per driver, miles driven per household, and miles driven per vehicle\u2014peaked in 2004 and mostly have been trailing off ever since. His first study had found that the total number of registered vehicles peaked in 2008 (though the total number of car Americans own may increase again simply because the U.S. population will continue to grow even if the average miles per person tapers off).  So what&amp;#039;s going on? Sivak cites four key factors at play. The first two\u2014the increasing urbanization of the country and the slight uptick in people&amp;#039;s use of public transportation\u2014often come up in discussions of why so few young Americans are getting driver&amp;#039;s licenses and buying cars. The fact that the median American driver is getting older is the third factor: Older people simply log fewer miles on average than younger drivers, Sivak says. He also mentions telecommuting/working from home\u2014whether or not people are doing it by choice. Yet none of these factors presents a clear idea of why 2004 would be the year driving peaked. &amp;quot;I think it&amp;#039;s a very good question, and I don&amp;#039;t think I have a good answer,&amp;quot; Sivak tells PopMech\u2014none of these small changes on their own would be able to account for the driving drop-off. What about gas prices? A quick survey of 9-year-old panicked web headlines reveals that 2004 was the year Americans stared down the specter of $2 per gallon gas. But Sivak isn&amp;#039;t so sure fuel cost was a deciding factor. Today we&amp;#039;re all dealing with $3 and $4 gas and still many people can&amp;#039;t avoid driving even if they&amp;#039;d like to. &amp;quot;What people get afraid of keeps moving upward,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;What is &amp;#039;too high&amp;#039; is always adjusted upward.&amp;quot; And while it&amp;#039;s clear that Americans have reacted to escalating gas prices by buying higher-mpg cars, he says, he can&amp;#039;t say for sure how much the price of gas contributed to the decline in how many miles we drive. Sivak tells PopMech that in the coming months, he hopes a bigger group of smart people will dig into the data and tease out the causes a little more. It won&amp;#039;t be easy, because the landscape of how Americans get around is constantly changing. Consider these charts of Census Bureau data about commuting that NPR published his week. They show that carpooling is on the wane despite the cost of driving, and that people still commute more by car and less by walking or public transit than they did in 1980 or 1960\u2014though, as Sivak noted, working at home is one the rebound. It would seem, then, that Americans who travel to an office still do it primarily by auto, but that fewer Americans are making the trip. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a9268/2004-the-year-driving-peaked-15727739/>