Americans Spend Seven Workweeks Behind the Wheel Annually, Study Shows

CARS.COM — Americans are often characterized as being driven, but what’s for certain is that we do an awful lot of driving. According to a just-released study by travel-services provider AAA, U.S. drivers on average spend 290 hours — or the equivalent of more than seven 40-hour workweeks — behind the wheel each year.

Related: Is Your City’s Commute Among the Worst in the U.S.?

The “American Driving Survey,” conducted by AAA’s Foundation for Traffic Safety using data reported by nearly 6,000 drivers about their daily driving habits in 2014 and 2015, shows that motorists drove 2.45 trillion miles last year — a 2.4 percent increase from 2014. On average, American drivers log almost 10,900 miles each, annually, and make 2.1 trips a day, each covering 30 miles over 48 minutes.

Previous research has shown that a substantial portion of the collective U.S. drive time is spent commuting to and from work. According to the 2015 Traffic Scorecard from urban-mobility data firm INRIX, American commuters spent an average of 50 hours each in traffic last year for a total of more than 8 billion hours. Los Angeles laid claim to the worst commute, at 81 hours a year — two full workweeks — followed by Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, both logging 75 hours. The INRIX study attributed the nation’s growing gridlock to a strong economy, population growth, higher employment rates and low gas prices.

AAA said that detailed data about when, where and how much people drive is vital to traffic-safety research, and that existing federal data has “significant limitations.” Some of the key findings of this latest report are as follows:

• Nearly 88 percent of Americans age 16 or older reported driving in the past year.
• More than 86 percent of U.S. households have at least one car for every driver in the home, while more than a quarter have more cars than drivers.
• More than 50 percent of the total miles are driven in cars, 20 percent in SUVs, 17 percent in pickup trucks and 8 percent in vans.
• Two-thirds of trips are taken, and nearly 62 percent of miles driven, by motorists with no passenger in the vehicle.
• Most driving is done during the fall (31.5 miles a day) and the least in the winter (26.2 miles a day).
• Drivers age 30 to 49 are behind the wheel more than any other age group, logging more than 13,500 miles annually.
• Midwestern and Southern drivers drive 21 percent more than those in the Northeast; likewise, rural motorists drive more than urban ones do.