GOTW: Miles driven to work

This time around, Graph of the Week focuses on one of those things “everyone” knows that ain’t necessarily so–the fact that Americans drive hideously long distances to their jobs.

The graph, courtesy of US Dept. of Energy and the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy program, shows that 58% of the trips to work are 10 miles or less:

The page for the above graph, along with a table of the data, is here.

A few points I feel compelled to make:

• The data is from 2001. I suspect there’s more recent data on this floating around out there, somewhere, but I haven’t tried to track it down. I doubt things have changed much in the intervening eight years; even in a mobile society like the US, I wouldn’t expect such a broad measure to shift radically when it depends on broad patterns of employment and living arrangements.
• The graph measure miles per “trip”, which I think is one-way, but I wouldn’t make any bar bets on this data without verifying that detail.
• The reason so many people have this notion of Americans driving 100 miles a day just to get to and from their place of work is attributable to our friends in the media. Every time the price of gasoline gets “high” they do the inevitable filler pieces showing people gassing up their vehicle and grumbling about the price, which often enough turns to the issue of just how far the person drives just to get to work–and whaddaya know, it’s really far! Honestly, I wish they would interview someone with a Prius (or a Scion xA driving, home working hypermiler, like me). But I guess that wouldn’t make nearly as “interesting” a narrative.