Graph and download economic data for Moving 12-Month Total Vehicle Miles Traveled (M12MTVUSM227NFWA) from Dec 1970 to Jul 2025 about miles, travel, vehicles, and USA.

Daily vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is a distance- and volume-based measure of driving on roadways for all motorized vehicle types—car, bus, motorcycle, and truck—on an average day. Per capita VMT is the same measure divided by the same area's population for the same year. Per vehicle VMT divides VMT by the number of household vehicles available by residents of that geography in the same year. These three value types can be selected in the dropdown in the first chart below. Use the legend items to explore various geographies. The second chart below shows per capita and total personal vehicles available to the region’s households from the American Community Survey.

Normalizing VMT by a county or region's population, or household vehicles, is helpful for context, but does not have complete parity with what is measured in VMT estimates. People and vehicles come into the region from other places, just as people and vehicles leave the region to visit other places. VMT per capita compares all miles traveled on the region's roads to the region's population (for all ages) from the U.S. Census Bureau's latest population estimates. Vehicle counts for VMT are classified by vehicle types, but not by vehicle ownership. In 2017, statewide estimates for VMT by motorcycles, passenger cars, and two-axle single-unit trucks with four wheels made up 88% of Pennsylvania's VMT, and 95% of New Jersey's. These vehicle types are highly likely to be personal vehicles, owned by households, but a small percent could be fleet vehicles of companies or governments. The remaining VMT is made up of vehicle types like school and commercial buses and trucks with more than two axles so they are highly likely to be commercial vehicles.

The number of vehicle-miles traveled on all roads in the United States decreased by some 1.55 percent to approximately 3.17 trillion in 2022. Records for 2019 reported the highest annual level on record, at just under 3.3 trillion vehicle-miles traveled.

VMT is an estimate of travel based on traffic counts taken along the roads in New York State. Each year travel is estimated as part of the annual report to the Federal Highway Administration through the Highway Performance Monitoring System software application. The VMT estimate is stratified by the roadway Functional Classification of Principal Arterials, Minor Arterials, Collectors, and Local Roads & Street. The VMT data from 1985 through the current year is available.

Daily Miles Traveled (T14)

FULL MEASURE NAME
Total vehicle miles traveled

LAST UPDATED
August 2022

DESCRIPTION
Daily miles traveled, commonly referred to as vehicle miles traveled (VMT), reflects the total and per-person number of miles traveled in personal vehicles on a typical weekday. The dataset includes metropolitan area, regional and county tables for total vehicle miles traveled.

DATA SOURCE
California Department of Transportation: California Public Road Data/Highway Performance Monitoring System - http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/tsip/hpms/datalibrary.php
2001-2020

Federal Highway Administration: Highway Statistics - https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2020/hm71.cfm
2020

California Department of Finance: E-4 Historical Population Estimates for Cities, Counties, and the State - https://dof.ca.gov/forecasting/demographics/estimates/
2001-2020

US Census Population and Housing Unit Estimates - https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest.html
2020

CONTACT INFORMATION
vitalsigns.info@mtc.ca.gov

METHODOLOGY NOTES (across all datasets for this indicator)
Vehicle miles traveled (VMT) reflects the mileage accrued within the county and not necessarily the residents of that county; even though most trips are due to local residents, additional VMT can be accrued by through-trips. City data was thus discarded due to this limitation and the analysis only examines county and regional data, where through-trips are generally less common.

The metropolitan area comparison was performed by summing all of the urbanized areas for which the majority of its population falls within a given metropolitan area (9-county region for the San Francisco Bay Area and the primary metropolitan statistical area (MSA) for all others). For the metro analysis, no VMT data is available in rural areas; it is only available for intraregional analysis purposes. VMT per capita is calculated by dividing VMT by an estimate of the traveling population.

Data Source: California Office of Traffic Safety

This data biography shares the how, who, what, where, when, and why about this dataset. We, the epidemiology team at Napa County Health and Human Services Agency, Public Health Division, created it to help you understand where the data we analyze and share comes from. If you have any further questions, we can be reached at epidemiology@countyofnapa.org.

Data dashboard featuring this data: https://data.countyofnapa.org/stories/s/abqu-wcty

Why was the data collected?  California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) ranking metric is a tool used to compare similarly sized cities on traffic safety statistics. A smaller the assigned number means that the city is ranked higher, and a higher ranking means the city has worse traffic safety compared to similar locations.

How was the data collected? Crash data comes from Statewide Traffic Records System (SWITRS). This system collects and processes data gathered from a collision scene. Population estimates come from California Department of Finance (DoF), which are based on changes in births, deaths, domestic migration, and international migration. Estimates are developed using aggregate data from a variety of sources, including birth and death counts provided by the Department of Public Health, driver's license data from the Department of Motor Vehicles, housing unit data from local governments, school enrollment data from the Department of Education, and federal income tax return data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Daily Vehicle Miles Traveled (DVMT) come from California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). The Traffic Data Branch at Caltrans estimates the number of vehicle miles that motorists traveled on California State Highways using a sampling of up to 20 traffic monitoring sites and reports on that data. Crash rankings are based on a ranking method that assigns statistical weights to categories including observed crash counts, population, and vehicle miles traveled. Counties are assigned statewide rankings, while cities are assigned population group rankings. DUI arrests data comes from the Department of Justice.

Who was included and excluded from the data & Where was the data collected? Data for the rankings is taken from Incorporated cities only. This includes local streets and state highways within city limits that share jurisdiction with the CHP. DUI arrest data is only available for cities that report it to the Department of Justice. Data from the OTS crash was sources specifically for Napa County, the City of Napa, American Canyon, Calistoga, St. Helena and Yountville.

When was the data collected? 2017-2022

Where can I learn more about this data? Office of traffic safety: https://www.ots.ca.gov/media-and-research/crash-rankings/ Methodology: https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/24410