commuting

Work Access: Major Metropolitan Areas: 2023

Wendell Cox — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 17:50:51 -0400

The latest work access data (journey to work and work at home) has been released. In 2023, transit commuting remained 30% below its 2019 pre-pandemic level, at 3.5%. This is an improvement from 3.1% in 2022. Driving alone was also below the pre-pandemic level, at 69.2%, compared to 75.9%. This was largely the result of the hybrid work revolution, which drove the work from home level to 13.8%, up more than 240% from the pre-pandemic level. The 2023 figure is below the 15.2% level of 2022.

The strongest transit markets were New York, at 23.8% of commuters. No other major transit market exceeded a 10% market share. Before the pandemic, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Washington and Seattle typically exceeded 10% shares.

Some transit markets in which there were major capital expenditures for rail systems now have shares of 1.0% or less, including Austin, Charlotte, Dallas-Fort Worth and Virginia Beach-Norfolk.

The table below shows data for the 56 major metropolitan areas and national data.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Austin Leads Working at Home Commute Share: 2022

Wendell Cox — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 17:49:45 -0400

The just released American Community Survey indicates that 28.0% of the commuters in the Austin metropolitan area work from home, which is the highest figure among the 56 major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population). Austin displaces last year’s leader, San Francisco.

The table below lists the 10 major metropolitan areas with the largest work from home shares in 2022. Each of these metropolitan areas has been rated as a tech hub by industry publications.

WORK FROM HOME MARKET SHARE: 2022
Major Metropolitan Area	Work from Home
Austin, TX	28.0%
San Francisco, CA	27.0%
Raleigh, NC	26.1%
Washington, DC-A-MD-WV	25.4%
Seattle, WA	25.4%
San Jose, CA	24.4%
Denver, CO	23.7%
Portland, OR-WA	23.3%
Charlotte, NC-SC	22.3%
Phoenix, AZ	21.7%
Source: American Community Survey: 2022

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

US Work Trip Access in 2021 (Journey to Work Data)

Wendell Cox — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 15:17:23 -0500

The following table provides US work access data for the 56 major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population). A previous article highlighted the huge increase telework access (working from home).

Teleworking tripled from pre-pandemic 2019 to 2021 to 17.9 percent. The 2019 figure had been the highest ever recorded (5.7 percent). At the same time, transit use fell by approximately one-half, to 2.5 percent, the lowest ever recorded.

There was also a record decline in auto use, principally because commuters were telecommuting in much larger numbers.

Photo: Las Vegas Urban Area, with 71% of Nevada’s population, it is the 5th densest major urban area in the United States as of 2020 (following San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, New York and Honolulu. Credit: Stan Shebs, downtown Las Vegas, Nevada via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

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Standardizing the Gig Hybrid Work Week?

Wendell Cox — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 11:57:30 -0500

San Francisco Examiner reporter Jeff Elder describes efforts to coordinate hybrid work schedules that involve working part time at home and part time in the office (“Tech industry’s ‘three-day work week’ may change the future of the office forever”). Elder notes that tech workers, in the Bay Area seem to be gravitating toward working at home on Mondays and Fridays, and working in the office Tuesday through Friday.

Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute told the Examiner. “There’s going to have to be some experimentation. We’re going to end up somewhere around three days a week in the office. As we talk to companies, they increasingly say around three days in the office is what they want from employees.”

According to Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University, “In 2022, employees will increasingly be required to come in on set days, with the payoff of working from home on the other days.”

A Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday work in the office week might offer employees an organized period to maximize collaboration, as opposed to less formalized arrangements in which employee attendance would be more random.

Such an arrangement would seem to have potential to maximize Tech employee productivity in the Bay Area, the world’s largest Gig labor market.

Transit Commuting Falls Behind Working at Home in 2017… New US Census ACS data

Wendell Cox — Wed, 19 Sep 2018 14:18:00 -0400

After years of substantially increasing numbers, working at home has now exceeded transit as an employment access mode. In 2017, 8 million people worked at home, compared to 7.6 million riding transit in the U.S. Since 2010, the share of workers at home has risen 21 percent, compared to transit’s 1 percent rise. More details will follow on newgeography.com shortly.

More Californian’s Continue to Drive Despite Policies to Discourage

Wendell Cox — Wed, 04 May 2016 10:56:05 -0400

“California Commuters Continue to Choose Single Occupant Vehicles,” according to a report by the California Center for Jobs and the Economy. The Center indicated:

“The recent release of the 2014 American Community Survey data provides an opportunity to gauge how California commuters have responded to this shifting policy. The data clearly reflects that even with the well-documented and rapidly rising costs of the state’s traffic congestion and costs associated with the deteriorating condition of the state’s roads, California workers continue to rely on single occupant vehicles for the primary mode of commuting. Moreover, their reliance on this mode of travel continues to grow both in absolute and relative terms (emphasis in original).

California has experienced substantial growth since 1980. There are approximately 7,000,000 more workers today than 35 years ago. The Census Bureau data shows that 83 percent of the new commuting has been by single-occupant automobile. Working at home accounted for 11 percent of the new commuting, while transit accounted for less than one half that figure, at 4.5 percent (Figure). In 1980, transit accounted for more than three times the volume as working at home. By 2014, the number of people working at home exceeded that of transit commuters.

The Center noted that state policies to discourage single-occupant commuting had been of little effect:

“The substantial investments in public transit, bike lanes, and other alternative modes have not produced major gains in commuter use. Instead, these investments appear to have simply shifted the choices made by commuters who already are committed to getting to work through modes other than single occupant vehicles. From 1980 to 2000, public transit use grew by 116,000 while “other” modes dropped by the same amount. From 1980 to 2005, public transit use grew by 121,000 while “other” modes dropped by 113,000. In the following years, 1/3 of the growth in public transit and “other” modes was offset by reductions in carpool use.”

The report credited impressive public transit gains in the San Francisco Bay Area, but went on to say that:

“even in the Bay Area, growth of public transit and the “other modes” has come largely from the shrinking relative use of carpooling.”

While improving transit ridership is a good thing, to the extent that it removes passengers from car pools, there is no gain in traffic, because the car and driver are still on the road.

The report laid considerable blame on the cost of houses in California:

“California, the growing body of land use, energy, CEQA, and other regulations affecting housing cost and supply has put both the cost of housing ownership and rents within traditional employment centers out of the reach of many households.”

California’s housing affordability is legendarily desperate. Since the imposition of strong land use regulations began in the early 1970s, the median house price has risen from three times (or less) times median household incomes in of the state’s metropolitan areas to over nine times today in the San Jose and San Francisco metropolitan areas, over eight times in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas and over five times in the Riverside-San Bernardino area (Inland Empire).

Perhaps the most important “take-away” from the report was that: “The current de facto policy of trying to reduce commuting by increasing congestion and its associated costs to commuters has to date not shown itself to be successful.” Simply stated, the vast majority of jobs and destinations in all of California’s urban areas are not accessible by transit in a reasonable time. The question for most California commuters is, for example, not whether to drive or take transit to work, but whether to go to work at all, since most jobs are not readily accessible except by car.

Sources for Our "Southern California Stuck in Drive" Story

Wendell Cox — Sat, 06 Dec 2014 19:16:05 -0500

Joel Kotkin and I wrote in the Orange County Register that transit work trip market shares in the Los Angeles area had changed little, from 5.9 percent in 1980 to 5.8 percent in 2013. In a response, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACTMTA) noted that we did not cite sources. Fair enough. Our source was the 1980 US Census and the 2013 American Community Survey, a product of the United States Census Bureau. This data shows Los Angeles to rank 10th in transit market share among the 52 major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population), well below its population rank of 2nd.

Then LACMTA goes on to note "the percentage of daily transit commuters in the Los Angeles region ... has stayed steady over the last several decades." That is exactly our point --- that transit is not growing as a percentage of travel in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. This, despite expenditures of $15 billion to build rail over the period in constant 2013 dollars (estimated from data on the Thoreau Institute website).

Portland Light Rail Revolt Continues

Wendell Cox — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 12:28:59 -0400

In a hard fought election campaign, voters in the city of Tigard appear to have narrowly enacted another barrier to light rail expansion in suburban Portland. The Washington County Elections Division reported that with 100 percent of precincts counted, Charter Amendment 34-210 had obtained 51 percent of the vote, compared to 49 percent opposed.

The Charter Amendment establishes as city policy that no transit high capacity corridor can be developed within the city without first having been approved by a vote of the people. High capacity transit in Portland has virtually always meant light rail.

In a previous ballot issue, Tigard voters had enacted an ordinance requiring voter approval of any city funding for light rail. Similar measures were enacted in Clackamas County as well as King City in Washington County. Across the Columbia River in Clark County (county seat: Vancouver), voters rejected funding for connecting to the Portland light rail system. After the Clackamas County Commission rushed through a $20 million loan for light rail (just days before the anti-light rail vote), two county commissioners were defeated by candidates opposed to light rail, with a commission majority now in opposition.

Further, a Columbia River Crossing, which would have included light rail to Vancouver was cancelled after the Washington legislature declined funding. In a surreal aftermath, interests in Oregon seriously proposed virtually forcing the bridge on Washington, fully funding the project itself. A just adjourned session of the Oregon legislature failed to act on the proposal, which now (like Rasputin) appears to be dead.

At the same time, Portland's transit agency faces financial difficulty and has been seriously criticized in a report by Secretary of State. The agency has more than $1 billion in unfunded liabilities and carries a smaller share of commuters than before the first of its six light rail and commuter rail lines was opened. Moreover, the latest American Community Survey data indicates that 3,000 more people work at home than ride transit (including light rail and commuter rail) to work in the Portland metropolitan area. Before light rail (1980), transit commuters numbered 35,000 more than people working at home. Over the period, transit's market share has dropped one-quarter.

A Summary of 2011 Commuting Data Released Today

Wendell Cox — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 13:40:25 -0400

The Census Bureau's American Community Survey released its annual one-year snapshot of demographic data in the United States. As usual, this included journey to work (commuting data), which is summarized in the table below.

American Community Survey Commuting Data
2011, 2010 & 2000
ESTIMATES of Total Commuters	2000	2010	2011
Drive Alone	97.10	104.86	105.64
Car/Van Pool	15.63	13.27	13.39
Transit	5.87	6.77	6.96
Bicycle	0.49	0.73	0.78
Walk	3.76	3.80	3.89
Motorcyle, Taxi & Other	1.24	1.60	1.63
Work at Home	4.18	5.92	5.99
Total	128.28	136.94	138.27
In Millions

MARKET SHARE
Drive Alone	75.70%	76.57%	76.40%
Car/Van Pool	12.19%	9.69%	9.68%
Transit	4.57%	4.94%	5.03%
Bicycle	0.38%	0.53%	0.56%
Walk	2.93%	2.77%	2.81%
Motorcyle, Taxi & Other	0.97%	1.17%	1.18%
Work at Home	3.26%	4.33%	4.34%
Total	100.00%	100.00%	100.00%

Sources: 2000, 2010 Census & 2011 American Community Survey

Trends Since 2010

As estimated employment improved from 137.9 million in 2010 to 138.3 from 2010 to 2011, there was an increase of 800,000 in the number of commuters driving alone, which, as usual, represented the vast majority of commuting (105.6 million daily one way trips), at 76.40 percent. This was not enough, however, to avoid a small (0.17 percentage point) decline in market share.

Car pooling experienced a rare increase of 120,000 commuters, which translated into a 0.1 percentage point loss in market share, to 9.68 percent. Transit increased 190,000 commuters, and had a 0.09 percentage point increase in market share, to 5.03 percent. This brought transit's market share to above its 2008 share of 5.01 percent and near its 1990 market share of 5.11 percent.

Working at home increased by 70,000, with a modest 0.1 percentage point increase from 2010.

Trends Since 2000

Even with declining falling household incomes and rising gasoline prices, single-occupant commuting continued to rise between 2000 and 2011. Solo drivers increased nearly 8 million, more than the total transit commuting in 2011. Car pooling continued its long-term decline, falling 2.2 million. Transit did well (as would be expected with unfavorable economic conditions and unprecedented gasoline price increases), as we noted last year, having added 1.1 million commuters. This was spread thinly around the country, though with a 70 percent concentration in New York and Washington, DC. Over the period, working at home experienced an increase of 1.8 million, the largest increase outside solo driving.

Media Attention

For the most part the commuting data was ignored by the media --- and for good reason. The one year changes were predictably modest. However, the exception was USA Today, with a top of the webpage "Fewer Americans Driving Solo" headline. In fact, as noted above, the short term and long term trends reflected an increase in solo driving. Moreover, reading the story it would be easy to get the impression that a sea change had occurred in how people get to work. To its credit, however, USA Today appropriately labeled the likely reasons for the mountains it made into molehills --- the economy and gasoline prices.

Infographics: The Decongestion of Manhattan, New York Walking Commutes

Aaron M. Renn — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 11:53:21 -0400

Jim Russell pointed me at an interesting article about densification vs. de-densification over at the Urbanization Project at NYU Stern. It contains this very interesting map of the change in census tract densities in Manhattan over the century between 1910 and 2010:

Walking Related Commutes

Streetsblog, in an article covering the annual NYC DOT scorecard, included this graphic of the percentage of commutes that include walking as a core component (e.g, transit) in various parts of New York:

This post originally appeared at The Urbanophile.