Vehicle Miles Traveled Are Back. The Pattern Underneath Has Changed.
Total vehicle miles traveled in the United States surpassed pre-pandemic levels for the first time in 2024. Federal Highway Administration data show 3.28 trillion miles driven, clearing the 3.26 trillion recorded in 2019. On its face, the road network is as busy as it ever was. What that headline number conceals is a structural shift in when, where, and why people drive.
The GAO’s 2026 review of telework’s transportation effects separates the aggregate from the composition. Commute trips — the structured, directional, peak-hour movements that defined pre-pandemic traffic engineering — are down. Non-commute trips are up. The result is a vehicle network carrying similar total volume through a substantially different daily shape.
Among MPOs in large communities, 49 percent reported that the number of commute trips declined in 2024 compared to 2019. Among medium communities, 30 percent reported the same. ACS data corroborate the directional shift: the number of people driving to work during morning rush hours — defined as 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. — decreased. The steepest drop was in the 7–8 a.m. window, down 5.0 percent. Meanwhile, late-morning departures (10 a.m. to noon) increased by 1.3 percent nationally. Workers with telework flexibility are compressing their office days, avoiding peak hours, or skipping office travel entirely on certain days of the week.
Non-commute trips filled the gap. Among MPOs in large communities, 62 percent reported an increase in non-commute trips. Many of these trips were previously bundled with commutes — school drop-off, errands, appointments routed through a downtown office trajectory. With telework removing the commute anchor, these trips still occur but on different schedules and along different corridors. Monday and Friday, GAO notes, tend to be high-telework days, producing lighter commute volumes but elevated midday and school-timing traffic in residential areas.
Forty percent of MPOs reported changing the scope of capital investment for roadway projects in response to these shifts. Colorado’s replacement of a planned Denver highway expansion with a bus rapid transit project is one visible example. Roadway reconfiguration — adding bike lanes, removing parking, creating pedestrian infrastructure — was reported by nearly 70 percent of MPOs surveyed. San Francisco voters permanently closed two roads to car traffic that had been temporarily closed during the pandemic, converting the corridors to walking and cycling paths.
The greenhouse gas dimension is modest but real. Large communities recorded, on average, a 3.7 percent reduction in the number of drivers during morning rush hours in 2024 versus 2019. Thirty-eight percent of surveyed large MPOs reported that telework had supported regional goals for reducing transportation-related emissions. The effect is present but not transformative — total miles traveled are higher, suggesting that non-commute trips and longer-distance residential relocations have absorbed much of what commute reduction might have conserved.
The planning challenge is that the old traffic models were calibrated to predict a world organized around the weekday commute. That world has not disappeared, but it now shares the road with a more diffuse and temporally irregular travel demand that resists the same forecasting frameworks.