Cities Where Car Travel Is Surging

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 13, 9:11AM EDT

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Cities Where Car Travel Is Surging — © TriggerPhoto / iStock via Getty Images

Car travel dropped almost everywhere in America during the COVID-19 pandemic. People stopped going to work. Schools were closed. Retail outlets were shuttered along with movie theaters and many vacation destinations. Slowly, that has started to change. Disney, for example, has started to open theme parks. Huge retailers like Walmart have opened back up to full capacity. “Working from home” may become the exception and not the rule as companies begin to tell people to return to their offices. In one or two cities, traffic patterns have returned to normal in sharp contrast to a year ago.

According to Route Fifty, “Nationwide, the average daily number of VMTs in March 2021 was 20% higher than in March 2020, when many states began to enact travel restrictions.” “VMT” means vehicle miles traveled.

Another sign people are driving more is that car sales have reached near all-time record levels. While this had driven new and used car prices through the roof and contributed to national inflation, people are still flooding dealerships.

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While the change from city to city and state to state based on VMT data is widely different, two Florida cities have seen large increases in traffic. Route Fifty reports:

The two Florida cities “were already returning to a more traditional daily traffic pattern by February this year,” the report states. “This is a warning sign that other cities may soon follow suit, as remote work gradually gives way to office commutes.”

It is not clear why these two cities have outpaced the balance of the U.S. metro areas. However, based on analysis by StreetLight Data, other cities are moving in the same direction.

It seems the rush hour has started to return. The percent of people eventually called back to offices will affect these numbers. Based on anecdotal reports, many large companies want all or part of their workforces back by the end of the year. People will get a chance to drive all those new cars.

Click here to read America’s 50 Worst Cities To Drive

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.