
After hovering around 28 million gallons/day for the previous 3 months, usage in May 2013 drops nearly 15% to 24.4 millions gallons/day. This drop is second only to the nearly 25% drop between September and October 2011.
If the economy were recovering, we'd see people driving more. As you see, not only are they not driving more, they're making severe cutbacks.
In the good old bad days we only needed to double our usage to get back to 2007 usage levels (which are still below record usage). Now we need to not only double usage, but add another 10 million gallons a day as well.
This makes the last 7 months in a row that usage is at record lows since the EIA started tracking in January 1983. All the data is at the link below.
EIA Gasoline Data