Motorists on a typical weekday log roughly 200,000 trips on North Carolina’s Triangle Expressway in the Raleigh-Durham region, many of them commuters headed to the state’s Research Triangle Park.
But on the first Monday in April, just 69,000 tolls were collected.
Similar scenes are playing out across the U.S. as Americans drive roughly half as much as they did before the coronavirus prompted broad stay-at-home directives to combat the spread. Plazas along the Pennsylvania Turnpike now sit mostly empty, while Google Maps show freeways around Los Angeles, New York and Atlanta usually choked with traffic now largely free of cars.