The average American driver drives about 14,000 miles per year. The average Wyoming driver drives almost twice that.
Americans collectively drive about 3.2 trillion miles per year. That’s a lot of vehicle mileage. More miles than has been covered in all of NASA’s space exploration to date, in fact. Yes, even including Voyager.
Delving into the Federal Highway Administration’s data, though, it’s interesting to see where people are (and aren’t) driving.
The state with the least amount of driving is Rhode Island (assuming we do not consider Washington, DC to be a state). It’s also the smallest state, so it would be pretty easy to draw a correlation there.
With a high population density and only about 10,000 miles per driver per year, it’s a pretty obvious connection. New York is close behind for that low spot.
By contrast, Wyoming is the least populated state and people here log an average of 24,000 miles per year.
Our closest rival for least populated state, Vermont, logs a mere 13,000 per driver per year. The next-closest state to Wyoming for most miles driven per driver is Mississippi at almost 20,000 per year, followed by New Mexico at just over 19,100 per year.
The FHA posits that the reason the states with the highest number of miles driven per driver are that way is that they are less densely populated and more rural than states which have lower mileage per.
That is basically true, as all of the highest driving states are what most Americans would consider “fairly spread out.” Though compared to Wyoming, states like Mississippi, Indiana, Missouri, and Georgia (all 18k+ mileage states) are pretty city-happy. But we don’t judge.
Interestingly, most of the traditionally western states like Nebraska, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado are all middle-of-the-road in terms of miles driven. Only Texas bucks that trend at the 16,000 mark.
Another interesting statistic from the Highway Administration is costs of fuel. A meme has been circulating about how much people in each state pay for fuel, which is presented as heating and cooling costs, but includes gasoline and diesel as well.
Wyoming is at the top of that list because we drive about twice as much as the average American. If you remove fuel costs from the meme’s numbers, Wyoming falls to about the middle for energy costs.
And then there is fuel spending. Adjusting for inflation, fuel spending today totals about twice as much per year for most Americans when compared to 1950 numbers. But in that same time period, we’ve increased our average driving mileage as well. From 9,000 then to today’s 14,000.
Overall, the takeaway is that Wyoming drivers spend more time behind the wheel and thus spend more money on vehicles than does the rest of the nation.
Our wide open spaces, empty highways, and small towns mean that we do a lot of driving. And I think that, if we ignore what local social media posts have to say, we’re probably better at it than are most others too. We get a lot of practice.
