American Driving Survey: 2023

Abstract

Introduction

Travel behaviors in the United States have settled into a new normal after the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This Research Brief provides highlights from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety’s 2023 American Driving Survey, which quantifies the daily driving of the U.S. population in 2023 and compares results to 2022 and 2021. Additionally, this Research Brief extends analyses of survey data to examine the age of vehicles driven by the American public and explores differences by population groups. Vehicle age is an important component of crash risk as newer vehicles are equipped with more advanced safety features, which reduce fatalities and injuries.

Methodology

Members of a pre-recruited research panel were invited to participate in an online or telephone interview in which they were asked to report basic information about all of the travel that they did on the day before the interview. Approximately 5,100 participants were interviewed each year, with interviews spread approximately evenly over all days of the year. The survey was administered in English and in Spanish, primarily online but also by telephone to increase the survey’s coverage of the population.

Estimates of daily driving were obtained by computing the mean numbers of trips, minutes, and miles of driving reported by respondents. Estimates of trip-level characteristics, including the proportion of trips by category, mean minutes, and miles per driving trip, were obtained from a dataset of all driving trips reported by respondents. Estimates of trip-level characteristics by vehicle age, including the proportion of trips, mean minutes, and miles per driving trip, were estimated using data from a dataset including all driving trips where respondents reported the year of the vehicle. Estimates of total trips, minutes, and miles driven by all drivers nationwide annually were obtained by multiplying daily driver-level means by 365 to produce annualized statistics and then multiplying by the estimated total number of drivers in the United States.

Statistics reported in this Research Brief are based on interviews performed between January 1, 2021, and December 31, 2023. Data were weighted to account for each respondent’s probability of having been invited to participate in the survey and to align the demographic characteristics of the respondents with those of the U.S. population.

Key Findings

• 95.3% of U.S. residents ages 16 years and older drove at least occasionally in 2023, unchanged from 2022 and 2021.
• Drivers made an average of 2.43 driving trips, spending 60.7 minutes behind the wheel and driving 29.1 miles each day in 2023, all of which represented no statistically significant changes relative to 2022.
• Projecting these results nationwide, drivers made a total of 229 billion driving trips, spent 95 billion hours driving, and drove 2.74 trillion miles in 2023.
• Some of the travel patterns reported by population groups were consistent with both pre- and post-pandemic trends:
  • Respondents from non-metropolitan areas took more driving trips and drove longer in terms of miles compared to respondents from metropolitan areas in 2023.
  • Respondents from the Midwest, West, and South drove more in terms of miles and minutes than those residing in the Northeast in both 2022 and 2023.
• Other travel patterns, first observed after the onset of the pandemic, have continued in 2023:
  • Drivers with a high school education or GED reported driving more miles than those with a bachelor’s degree.
  • Hispanic or Latino drivers had the highest driving durations and miles compared to all other ethnic groups.
• Findings related to vehicle age:
  • Drivers in 2023 used newer vehicles (< 10 years) to undertake more trips, spend longer durations driving, and cover greater distances in miles compared to older vehicles. However, 40% of trips were undertaken in vehicles that were at least 10 years old.
  • A higher proportion of teenagers (aged 16 – 19) drove vehicles older than 14 years in 2023.
  • Respondents with lower education levels drove more miles and in older vehicles compared to respondents with higher levels of education.