Increased Holiday Weekend Travel Expected
Despite high gas prices, travel expected to rebound from pandemic levels.
A view of westbound Highway 94 leaving Milwaukee. Gretchen Brown/WPR
The Memorial Day holiday weekend is shaping up to be one of the busiest travel weekends since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
AAA Wisconsin is projected 740,946 Wisconsin residents will travel 50 or more miles between Thursday and Monday. That’s not quite as many as what the state saw in 2019, but it’s 7.4 percent more than last year’s travel numbers.
“They want to find other ways to make a trip work within their budget, and they’ll cut expenses wherever they can elsewhere to make sure they can still have that vacation that they’ve been looking forward to,” he said.
In past years, Jarmusz said, those offsets have meant “staying at a less expensive hotel, or even eating in, if you have the ability to do so, versus going out to dinner a few times. Gas prices are never going to be the most expensive part of your travel budget, and so there are always ways that people can make it work and still get out there.”
Memorial Day weekend is traditionally the start of peak travel season.
Jarmusz said it’s likely the increased demand will continue through the summer.
Even with high gas prices, Memorial Day travel expected to ramp up in Wisconsin was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.
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As a side note I read that gas consumption this year is actually down from years prior but prices are much, much higher.
For 2022 the Energy Department’s EIA reported that gasoline consumption, at 8.85 million barrels per day was down by 2.7% from the same period in 2021, and by 6.1% from the same period in 2019.
According to the EIA gas reached an average of $4.59 per gallon of regular, compared to $3.02 per gallon in 2021 and $1.96 in 2020.
This article referring to Memorial travel data from AAA seems rather pointless and anecdotal. Why doesn’t Wisconsin Public Radio just report much more useful data from the government and changes to government policy? Useful info, like for some reason in 2016 the US lifted a ban on exporting domestically produced oil. Biden might want to rethink that policy. (But according to Barrons, “The country now exports more than eight million barrels of crude and products per day—while it consumes some 20 million barrels domestically—and the practice has helped refiners and domestic producers improve their financial results”. Biden might not do anything at all. Don’t want to upset those financial interests!)