Cars outnumber drivers in US

For the first time, the typical American family has more vehicles in the garage than licensed drivers in the house.

The shock figures came in the US Transportation Department’s latest national survey.

There are 107 million US households, each with an average of 1.9 cars, trucks or sport utility vehicles and 1.8 drivers, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics reported. That equals 204 million vehicles and 191 million drivers.

The last time the survey was conducted, in 1995, those numbers were equal. The new survey was released earlier this week.

“This is the final realisation of the entire American ethos,” said Robert Lang, director of Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute, which researches regional growth. ”There’s a real love of the road.”

Alan Pisarski, author of Commuting In America, said the trend had been clear for a long time.

“We’ve added more cars than people for the last two decades,” Pisarski said, “and the average number of people per household has been declining”.

There are myriad reasons for the proliferation of vehicles: more families with two breadwinners driving separately to work, more teenagers with cars of their own, more families with recreational or weekend wheels, plus longer-lasting cars.

At one time cars were sent to the scrap heap with 100,000 or fewer miles on their odometers. Now it’s common to drive them for 200,000 miles or more.

“There is an extraordinary availability of low-cost automobiles,” Pisarski said. “People are buying 10-year-old cars.”

Americans love cars so much they have remade their communities because of them, Lang said. Suburban sub-divisions have replaced downtown apartment buildings in many areas. The result is more daily trips to buy groceries or go to the shopping mall.

The average person in the United States takes four trips a day. Nearly half - 45% – are for shopping or errands.

“We’re taking many short trips we used to make on bike or on foot,” said James Corless, spokesman for the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a group that advocates balanced transportation.

The Transportation Department survey of 60,000 people, conducted in 2001 and 2002, found 91% of people who commuted used their own cars or trucks. Of all personal vehicles, 57% are cars or estates, 21% vans or sport utility vehicles and 19% light trucks.

The survey found just 8% of US households did not have cars.

With a fear of terrorism, many people are staying closer to home. And that means car rides rather than plane trips.

In 2000, 83% of all leisure trips were taken by car, according to Virginia travel research firm DK Shifflet & Associates. In 2002, that number rose to 84.9%.

“A car seems like a comfy, happy place,” Lang said. ”When you hit the velvety highway out there, that’s when it all make sense.”