This blog is the second in a three-part series examining what rising gas prices reveal about the U.S. transportation system. As global disruptions push fuel prices higher, this series explores how Americans are affected, how people adapt, and what a more resilient transportation future looks like.
By Eric Murphy
Most traffic models and transportation plans assume people’s travel behavior is largely predictable and unchanging. Usually, this means more and more driving year after year, and investments aimed at meeting that rising demand. But the most recent spike in gas prices shows just how quickly people adapt their behavior to even small price cues.
As we wrote in the first part of this series, our transportation system is built on the assumption of cheap driving. That reliance on driving means that rising gas prices quickly impact household budgets, compounding the other costs of owning a car like insurance, maintenance, and financing costs, all of which are also going up. As gas prices have jumped by more than one-third in the last month, states have already felt pressure to intervene with drastic measures like Georgia suspending its fuel tax.
People also have to cut back and adapt, especially those with low incomes. In places with few alternatives to driving, those adjustments can be painful, with people forced to skip social and leisure trips, carpool, or cut back in other areas of an already stretched-thin budget.
In places with great transit service and walkable environments, adjusting to high costs can be smoother and less disruptive. In New York City, congestion pricing raised the cost of driving into Manhattan but led to many positive outcomes, including some traffic relief for drivers. Many New Yorkers have replaced car trips with transit, biking, or walking.
In the long term, providing options that give people the freedom to get around without driving for every trip can make them less vulnerable to price volatility. A recent story in The New York Times noted that some people are already trying to move closer to work to save on gas. With the total cost of owning a car rising by 40% since 2021, more people could move away from driving entirely or have one less car per household. In a recent discussion among SSTI’s Sustainability Network, several state officials noted vehicle registrations have been lower than expected in recent years.
The distance the average American drives each year peaked in 2004 and has remained relatively flat since. The increase in total vehicle miles traveled (VMT) has slowed in the 21st century, and VMT in 2025 was only about 2% higher than in 2019, right before the pandemic. Another prolonged spike in gas prices—paired with other rising costs of driving—is likely to push even more people to rethink how they get around.
Transportation agencies will benefit by updating their assumptions, models, and plans based on these emerging trends, even as gas prices eventually decline. Driving mostly increased year after year in the 20th century when prices were reliably lower and traffic was less persistent, but people are now showing just how quickly they adapt to price changes.
Part 3 of this series will explore how DOTs can best prepare themselves for a more uncertain future and build a transportation system that will be resilient to a variety of potential disruptions.
Photo credit: Taylor Heery on Unsplash. License.