Twice As Many Californians Are Walking, Biking, or Taking Mass Transit

In 2000, the huge percentage of trips Californians took by car foretold a depressingly Wall-E-ian future of sloth and unsustainable personal transit. In the great sunny state, home to LA and San Diego and all of Southern California, where winter exists only as a more comfortable version of autumn everywhere else, only 11 percent of household trips involved walking, biking, or taking public transit. Everyone else drove or was driven. The then-33 million residents of the nation's most populous state took nine out of ten of their trips by car.

But since the turn of the century, the share of non-car transport has more than doubled. A new, fairly comprehensive survey of Californians' transportation habits reveals that "the percentage of California residents walking, biking, or using public transportation on a typical day has more than doubled since 2000." Twice as many Californians are ditching the car to get around.

The study, carried out by California's Department of Transportation, also found that residents were finding the state much more walkable, citing "a dramatic increase in walking trips, which nearly doubled from 8.4 percent to 16.6 percent of trips." That could be due to a number of factors: more people moving into, or developing, denser, walkable communities, a rising and stroll-encouraging price of gas, or a general boost in health-consciousness.

It does seem to indicate that driving is indeed finally slumping, even in the poster state of the highway and car-centric suburban development. The US Public Interest Research group points out that the survey "found that 49.7 percent of trips in 2012 were driving a car, van or truck – a drop from 60.2 percent in 2000," though the "percent of passenger trips on such vehicles remained flat at about 25 percent."

“These data provide more clear evidence that America’s driving boom is over,” Phineas Baxandall, Senior Analyst at the US PIRG, said in a statement. “Governments need to wake up to this trend and invest more in these expanding modes of travel, rather than wasting money on new highways we often don’t need.”

California's transit and environmental bureaus seem to agree.

"Californians are increasingly choosing alternatives to driving a car for work and play," Mart D. Nichols, the Chairman of the California Air Resources Board, said in a press release. "That's a shift with real benefits for public health that also cuts greenhouse gases and smog-forming pollution. California is committed to supporting this shift with better planning to support sustainable communities and healthier, low-carbon choices for travel."

PIRG says the California's report has national implications. The group says the data "further indicate a national trend away from driving that has been led by Millennials. After nearly sixty years of near-constant increases, 2013 was the ninth year in a row that annual per-person driving miles have fallen. National Highway Administration data shows that among Americans aged 16 to 34, per-person driving miles fell 23 percent between 2001 and 2009." The group's previous work points to rising social media use among 16-35 year-olds as another contributor to driving's decline.

An interesting side note in the study is that it's based on self-evaluations: Caltrans had participants ("109,000 persons from more than 42,000 households in 58 California counties") fill out diaries that documented their travel habits on a random day. This, some critics will argue, is fairly imprecise. But it demonstrates one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt: if Californians are fudging the numbers, they're at least not wanting to admit to driving.

The American will to drive, it seems, might be declining after all.