Commuting in the US: The car is still king

 

The Antiplanner

Randal O'Toole analyzes US commuting numbers from the Census Bureau:

The automobile has been the main method of commuting since at least 1960, when the Census Bureau first collected these data. In that year, just over two out of three workers went to work by auto. The Census Bureau didn’t break out driving alone vs. carpooling until 1980, by which time driving alone accounted for almost two-thirds of workers, with carpooling being another 20 percent. By 2000, driving alone reached 76 percent, a number around which it has hovered ever since—in 2019, it was 75.9 percent.

What about bikes?

Bicycling was so unimportant that the Census Bureau didn’t even include it on the survey until 1980, when it accounted for 0.5 percent of workers. In the early 2010s it reached 0.6 percent, with numbers peaking at over 900,000 in 2014. The numbers have since fallen to 800,000 or back to 0.5 percent in 2019.

Taxis were even less important than bicycles, but their numbers more than doubled in the last five years, no doubt because people count ride hailing as taxis. That represents an increase from 0.11 percent in 2014 to 0.25 percent in 2019. Neither seems like very much, but it potentially represents a big bite out of transit’s meager share.

 And Transit:

Transit carried 12.6 percent of workers to their jobs in 1960, but this fell to below 5 percent in 2000. Since then it has fluctuated around that number, some years gaining a tenth of a percent or two (usually at the expense of carpooling), some years losing. Between 2018 and 2019, it grew all the way from 4.93 to 4.96 percent.