You'd think car country means Los Angeles traffic jams. But the states with the most vehicles per driver are wide-open, rural ones. What's going on?
In wide-open rural states there is usually no subway, no city bus network, and no train to catch โ the distances are huge and neighbors can live miles apart. A vehicle isn't a luxury; it's how you get to school, the store and the doctor.
Basis: U.S. rural geography and transit coverage โ well documented.
Country life also comes with working vehicles: a family car, a pickup for hauling, sometimes a farm or ranch truck. On this site's official FHWA data, Montana tops the vehicles-per-driver quiz with about 2.7 registered vehicles per licensed driver.
Basis: This site's FHWA quiz (machine-checked): Montana is #1 in private vehicles per licensed driver.
Flip side: in big-city states, many people don't own a car at all โ they ride subways, buses and trains instead. Those states sit near the bottom of the same quiz.
Basis: Well-established: large-city transit ridership and low car ownership go together.
So is more cars = loving cars more? Not exactly. A neat idea is that vehicle counts mostly follow distance and jobs: the farther things are apart, and the more hauling a job needs, the more vehicles pile up per person. It fits the map, but family budgets and habits play a part too.
โป A hypothesis is an idea that isn't proven yet.
๐ Sources for the rankings mentioned in this note (links to the original data and retrieval dates) are on each quiz page below.