This paper summarizes travel trends in the United States and five regional areas for the period 1970-1995. Travel is summarized at the annual, monthly, weekly, and daily time scales. Data sources for this study included the annual vehicle travel estimates included in the Table VM-2 from Highway Statistics and traffic count data from approximately 5,000 Automatic Traffic Recorder (ATR) sites nationwide. The nation was split into 5 regions, corresponding to the regional breakdown in Traffic Volume Trends. It was found that travel has grown at approximately 3% per year over the past 25 years. For recent years urban travel makes up more than 60% of the total travel in the United States. The urban travel growth rate is slowing while rural growth rate is increasing. This shift in growth rates is also occurring at the regional level. The daily distribution of travel shows that, since 1978, traffic distribution during the day has undergone significant changes. The early morning hours (12 midnight to 4:00 a.m.) have declined as a percentage of the total ADT. The peaks in the morning and in the afternoon are increasing as a percentage of the total and the shoulders are growing into the middle of the day. The share of travel occurring during daylight hours (between 5:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m.) has been increasing since 1978, and accounts for over 80% of the travel during the day.

Driving is a fact of life. We are all spending more and more time on the road, and traffic is an issue we face everyday. This book will make you think about it in a whole new light. We have always had a passion for cars and driving. Now Traffic offers us an exceptionally rich understanding of that passion. Vanderbilt explains why traffic jams form, outlines the unintended consequences of our attempts to engineer safety and even identifies the most common mistakes drivers make in parking lots. Based on exhaustive research and interviews with driving experts and traffic officials around the globe, Traffic gets under the hood of the quotidian activity of driving to uncover the surprisingly complex web of physical, psychological and technical factors that explain how traffic works.

TRB Special Report 268 - Surface Transportation Environmental Research: A Long-Term Strategy defines a broad and ambitious research program to address and inform major public policy debates about the effects of surface transportation facilities and operations on the human and natural environments. The committee that conducted the study identified major gaps in knowledge that could be filled through a cooperative program of research involving federal agencies, states, and environmental organizations. The committee recommended creation of a new cooperative research program to carry out its recommended research agenda. Special Report 268 Summary

TRB¿s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 623: Identifying and Quantifying Rates of State Motor Fuel Tax Evasion explores a methodological approach to examine and reliably quantify state motor fuel tax evasion rates and support agency efforts to reduce differences between total fuel tax liability and actual tax collections.