PORTLAND, Maine — About 200,000 more travelers in the Northeast are expected to hit the road this Memorial Day weekend, marking the unofficial start of the summer tourist season.
The national forecast from AAA anticipates 700,000 more people will take trips over the holiday, hitting the highest level since 2005. This year also marks the lowest average gas prices across the country since that same year.
The Maine Turnpike Authority expects the weekend will continue steady traffic growth seen so far this year, with an expected 930,000 vehicles traveling the turnpike at some point during the weekend and about 55,000 cars leaving the state between 4 and 7 p.m. Monday.
The increase over the holiday follows on stronger traffic totals on the turnpike through the spring, with April traffic up about 6 percent, to 20.9 million passenger vehicle transactions for the month, according to the Maine Turnpike Authority.
Across New England, AAA projects about 1.6 million people will travel by car across the region and about 125,000 people will travel by plane, with air travel prices also down from Memorial Day weekends of the recent past.
Gasoline prices represent the major cause of the projected 2 percent increase in road trip travel. In a recent survey, AAA said about 55 percent of U.S. respondents said they were more likely to take a road trip sometime this year because of lower gas prices.
The state’s Department of Economic and Community Development said it expects higher tourist traffic throughout the 2016 season.
“We don’t project visitation numbers, but we are hearing anecdotally from the industry that early bookings for the 2016 summer season are strong across the state, up as much as 30 percent for some in places like Bar Harbor with Acadia’s centennial celebration this year,” Carolann Ouellette, director of the Maine Tourism Office, said in a news release.
Fall tourism was up strongly last year, Ouellette said, and the state has managed to attract more visitors in general from the Mid-Atlantic region.
Traffic on the Maine Turnpike was up substantially at the start of the year, though car travel likely was helped by one of the most snowless and mild winters in recent history.
AAA also factored improving economic circumstances into its projections for the year, expecting that more people would be encouraged to take trips during the first major holiday weekend of the summer.
With that travel, AAA also expects it will help or rescue more than 350,000 motorists nationally throughout the weekend, mostly for keys locked in cars, flat tires and dead batteries.
The group’s forecast is based on economic data from the market research firm IHS Global and historical travel estimates from monthly interviews of about 50,000 households by the firm D.K. Shifflet & Associates.