The full explanation for the dataset is here: US DOT link

The dataset breaks it down into "Population Staying at Home" and "Population Not Staying at Home" by day, so the "Population Staying at Home" is the difference of the Total US Population (~326M) and the "Population Not Staying at Home", or the population who take at least a trip in a day.

The paragraph that defines a trip is:

>Trips are defined as movements that include a stay of longer than 10 minutes at an anonymized location away from home. Home locations are imputed on a weekly basis. A movement with multiple stays of longer than 10 minutes before returning home is counted as multiple trips. Trips capture travel by all modes of transportation. including driving, rail, transit, and air.

Right... I probably could have left out "Not Staying Home" haha.

Data Source: U.S. DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics

Generated in Excel

Assumptions:

• National averages for 2019 data only (2020 and 2021 are outliers due to COVID, 2022 is not complete)
• Each "Trip Mile" category is calculated by multiplying the average of the range by the total number of trips taken for each respective category e.g. (# of trips)*(100+250)/2
• "Per Capita Not Staying Home" is a category in the data that differentiates the total population from the population who are actually travelling
• I am unsure if this includes commercial travel as well. Future analysis should differentiate this

Observations and Conclusions:

• Although >95% of trips taken are less than 30 miles, >50% of total miles travelled in a year are greater than 25 miles per trip.
  • This says that a plug-in hybrid may not be as effective as the number of trips less than 30 miles would make it seem
• About 76% of total miles travelled in a year are less than 100 miles per trip.
  • Maybe we don't actually need EV ranges >500 miles per charge!