WASHINGTON -- A new survey by AAA has revealed that Americans’ driving behavior is highly influenced by who they are and where they live.
The American Driving Survey, being conducted by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety and the Urban Institute, aims to provide a current and thorough view of American driving habits. The motorist group made the first results from the continuing study available last week.
“This is the first ongoing study that provides a look at when and how much Americans are driving,” said Peter Kissinger, president and CEO of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, a nonprofit educational and research organization that focuses on traffic safety. “Existing federal data with this level of detail was last released in 2009, eight years after the previous release. This substantially limits the extent to which we can use existing data to draw conclusions about Americans’ current driving habits.”
According to results from the American Driving Survey for the period from May 2013 to May 2014, motorists 16 years and older drove an average of 29.2 miles per day or 10,658 miles per year. They averaged two trips per day, with an average total duration of 46 minutes.
Americans averaged fewer miles on the weekend than weekdays—or 25.4 vs. 30.7 miles, respectively. They also reported driving the fewest miles in the winter months of January through March.
Differences emerged when the survey broke out Americans by gender, age, level of education and where they reside:
- While women took more individual driving trips, men spent more time driving and logged more miles. Women took 2.2 daily driving trips and 803 annual trips, compared to 1.9 daily trips and 694 annual trips for men; however, the duration of men’s daily and annual driving trips was about 25% longer then women’s, and they drove 35% more miles.
- Of the six age groups broken out by the survey, teens and seniors (adults older than 75) drove the least of all age groups, taking the fewest and shortest trips. Twenty-to-29-year-olds, which includes many millennials, ranked third in number of driving trips and second in miles driven, falling just behind 30-to-49-year-olds, who drove an annual average of 13,140 miles, the most of any age group.
- Drivers 20-to-29-years old were the only age group to report driving more miles with passengers than alone, while 50-to-64-year-olds were most likely to report driving solo.
- The higher the level of education a driver achieved, the more he or she drove. Drivers with graduate-school degrees took the greatest number of trips and logged the most miles, followed by college graduates. Drivers with a grade school or some high-school education took the fewest trips and drove the least number of miles. College graduates drove an average of 37.2 miles and 58 minutes per day, compared to an average of 19.9 miles and 32 minutes daily for grade-school or high-school graduates.
- Drivers who said they lived “in the country” or “a small town” reported driving greater distances (12,264 miles annually) and spending more time driving than those who lived in the city or a “medium-size town” (9,709 miles annually).
- Drivers who live in the South drove the most (11,826 miles annually) and those in the Northeast drove the least (8,468 miles annually).
Results from the American Driver Survey were based on telephone interviews with a nationwide sample of 3,319 drivers.
Click here to view the complete survey.
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