The typical American household vehicle spent just 64.6 minutes on the road during a normal day in 2022, sitting idle for the remaining 95 percent of the 24-hour cycle. That finding, drawn from the federal government’s most detailed travel-behavior dataset, puts a sharp number on a pattern that urban planners and transportation researchers have long suspected: the country’s roughly 280 million registered passenger vehicles spend the vast majority of their existence doing nothing at all. The gap between how much space cars demand and how little they actually move has real costs for cities, property owners, and drivers themselves.
Why 95 Percent Parked Time Matters in 2026
The 95 percent figure is not a rough estimate or an advocacy talking point. It comes directly from the 2022 National Household Travel Survey, a large-scale data collection effort published by the Federal Highway Administration and hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The survey captures trip-level records for tens of thousands of households, tracking when vehicles leave and return, how far they travel, and for what purpose. When the U.S. Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office calculated the complement of daily driving time, the math was straightforward: 64.6 minutes of driving leaves 1,375.4 minutes of parking per day.
That ratio carries weight right now because cities across the country are reconsidering how much land they set aside for parked cars. Zoning codes written decades ago assumed vehicles needed dedicated spaces at homes, offices, shopping centers, and hospitals. If each car sits unused for all but about an hour a day, those mandates may have overbuilt parking by a wide margin. The cost falls on developers, who pass it to tenants and buyers, and on municipalities, which maintain miles of curb space and surface lots that generate little tax revenue. Land that could host housing, parks, or businesses instead becomes storage space for machines that mostly sit still.
One question the federal data has not yet answered is whether the 95 percent average masks meaningful differences between neighborhoods. Suburban households, which tend to own more vehicles per adult and make fewer but longer trips, could plausibly show even higher parked shares than urban ones. Dense city neighborhoods with good transit might see cars used less frequently but for shorter errands, while rural areas could combine long-distance trips with long stretches of idling at home. The 2022 NHTS vehicle file includes geographic identifiers that researchers can geocode against census tract density, but no published federal table breaks out parked time by land-use type or vehicle age cohort. Until that analysis appears, the single national average is the best available benchmark, and it already tells a striking story.
Federal Data and Peer-Reviewed Research Behind the 95 Percent Claim
The strongest evidence trail starts with the U.S. Department of Energy’s technical summary, which reported that household vehicles were driven an average of 64.6 minutes on a typical day in 2022 and were therefore parked 95 percent of the time. That calculation relies on the National Household Travel Survey trip files, whose full methodology and downloadable datasets are available through the federal survey portal. The official Summary of Travel Trends report, cataloged in the National Transportation Library and accessible via the digital repository, confirms the same daily driving averages across household, person, and vehicle records.
Academic researchers have independently arrived at similar numbers using comparable methods. A peer-reviewed paper in Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives described private cars as idle roughly 95 percent of the time, using earlier NHTS waves and corroborating the pattern across multiple survey years. A separate study in the journal Cities examined parking infrastructure in Phoenix and found that applying local trip data to the national survey framework produced parked shares at or above the national 95 percent figure. Together, these sources form a consistent evidence base: federal survey data and independent academic replication point to the same conclusion.
The NHTS is designed to capture a “typical day,” not a holiday or a weather anomaly, by randomly assigning travel dates across the sample. That structure makes the 64.6-minute figure more robust than a one-off traffic count or a smartphone mobility snapshot. It reflects all purposes-commuting, errands, school drop-offs, social visits-and all times of day. By aggregating across vehicles rather than just people, the survey also captures the second or third car that may not move at all on a given day, which is crucial for understanding how much parking space is actually needed.
No updated daily driving minutes for 2023 or later years have been released through the NHTS program. The 2022 survey is the most recent public dataset, and no official statement from the Department of Energy or the Bureau of Transportation Statistics addresses whether remote-work shifts since 2022 have pushed the parked share even higher. Given that remote and hybrid work arrangements have persisted in many white-collar sectors, the 95 percent figure from 2022 could be a conservative floor rather than a ceiling. But without new nationally representative data, any claim about post-2022 changes remains speculative.
Gaps in the Parking Data That Still Need Answers
The 95 percent statistic is well sourced but limited in scope. It describes a national average for household vehicles on a typical day. It does not distinguish between a two-car suburban household where one vehicle never leaves the driveway and a single-car urban household that drives 90 minutes daily. Nor does it cover commercial fleets, ride-hail vehicles, or delivery vans, which may have very different duty cycles. Without published breakdowns by metro area, housing density, or vehicle count per household, planners are working with a blunt instrument when they try to right-size parking requirements for specific neighborhoods.
Direct federal estimates of the economic cost of excess parking supply are also absent from the available record. Secondary analyses and advocacy groups have produced figures, but no FHWA or BTS report in the current dataset quantifies how much money cities spend maintaining parking infrastructure that sits empty most of the day. That gap matters because local officials debating parking reform need hard numbers to counter pushback from developers and residents who worry about spillover parking on residential streets. Knowing that cars are parked 95 percent of the time is compelling; knowing how many millions of dollars that idle time translates into for a particular city would be even more persuasive.
Another missing piece is a standardized way to connect parked time with land use. The NHTS tells researchers how long vehicles are in motion, but not precisely where they sit when they are not. Are most cars stored in private driveways, on-street spaces, structured garages, or workplace lots? How much of that space is shared among uses versus reserved for a single building? Answering those questions would require combining federal travel data with local parcel maps, zoning codes, and parking utilization surveys-work that a few cities and universities have begun but that has not yet been scaled nationally.
For now, the practical takeaway for anyone involved in transportation, housing, or land-use decisions is straightforward: most household vehicles are stationary almost all the time, and policies built on the assumption of constant motion are out of step with reality. Cities considering reforms to minimum parking requirements can point to the federal 95 percent figure as a solid, if high-level, justification for allowing less on-site parking in new developments, especially near transit or in walkable areas. Property owners weighing whether to convert underused lots into housing or commercial space can treat the national average as evidence that some portion of their asphalt is likely doing little work.
The next wave of research will need to sharpen that picture. Disaggregated analyses of the 2022 NHTS could show how parked time varies by income, race, region, and urban form. Local studies can map where idle vehicles actually sit and how often spaces turn over. And economists can begin to quantify the opportunity cost of dedicating prime urban land to car storage instead of more productive uses. Until then, the 95 percent statistic serves as both a warning and an invitation: a warning that current parking norms are misaligned with how people actually use their cars, and an invitation to rethink how much space those mostly stationary machines truly deserve.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
