Originally Posted by
Roody
According to the NHTS, the average American drives 59.83 minutes on weekdays and 46.68 minutes on weekends. this means that their car is idle for more than 23 hours of every day. I think it's accurate to describe that as using the vehicle "only now and then."
If cars were quickly and economically available on an hourly-rental basis, I predict that a lot of people would forego 24 hour ownwership of an expensive machine that they use for less than an hour a day.
http://nhts.ornl.gov/2009/pub/stt.pdf (See Table 30)
"Average American drives" x minutes/day is not the same metric as how much time and how many trips/day are made with a car per household. The "Average American drives" stats above are reduced by including people in households who neither drive or have access to their own motor vehicle.
More relevant to the subject of "now and then"
use of a motor vehicle, 7 days a week all year is found in Table 3.
It should also be noted that every car trip in the NHTS survey, may require
two taxi or Uber fares unless the passenger chooses to leave the meter running while working, shopping, or spending a day in the park. Let's not forget Uber's crafty use of "surge pricing" to add cost uncertainty to every trip.
Also to be noted is that the survey was designed to collect only "daily" travel and exclude long distance travel in 2009. Therefore no data was captured for vacation use of a vehicle by anybody in the household.