Originally Posted by GodsBassist

Found this picture today and thought it was funny. This is a history of different predictions made by the DOT at the federal level for future VMT. The black line is actual.

The dates don't exactly line up, you'll see that the 2010 prediction was made in 2008 on the chart, and this has to do with some weird way that information is released by DOT. I don't fully understand it, you can google it for an explanation if you want.

Essentially, these predictions have been so terrible because they aren't made at the federal level, they're an aggregate composition of all the predictions made at the state or even more local levels. If you ask Wyoming what they expect their VMT to do, and then hinge road funding on the answer, they're of course going to say something along the lines of, "it's gonna go way up." The same thing happens in counties in Virginia, cities in California, and the state of New Jersey, because nobody wants to be told they're not getting as much money as last year because VMT is expected to go down for their region. This results in everybody giving inflated estimates, and the federal total being way out of line.

Originally Posted by GodsBassist

"AEO2014 includes a new, detailed demographic profile of driving behavior by age and gender as well as new lower population growth rates based on updated U.S. Census Bureau projections. As a result, annual increases in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) for light-duty vehicles (LDVs) in the AEO2014 Reference case average 0.9% from 2012 to 2040, compared to 1.2% per year in AEO2013 over the same period."