More people are driving to work because where they live and work offer them few options.

• Housing growth has been concentrated in suburban areas that tend to have poor transit service.  Census population figures released earlier this year show that most population growth has occurred in metro areas, but outside central cities.  These mostly suburban areas generally have spread-out development patterns where buses and trains are less likely to be available and carpooling is inconvenient.   The number of people living in these areas grew by 18 percent.  The number of people living in the central cities, where transit, bicycling, and walking infrastructure tend to be more prevalent, grew by just 8 percent.  Central cities are defined by the Census Bureau as the most populous cities within a metropolitan area.
   
  

• In 1997 and 1998, 90 percent of home buyers/sellers in Cincinnati moved "outwards" from the core, in Cleveland, it was 91 percent, in Columbus, 78 percent.
  
  

• Better transit, walking, and bicycling infrastructure are giving people in a few areas more choices in how to get to work, but the prevalence of spread-out housing and remote office parks has meant no choice but driving for many workers. In addition to the spread in housing patterns, worksites are now spread far from central cities.  Job growth has concentrated farther from central cities, where transit is less available.  According to a study by the Brookings Institution, in the 100 largest metropolitan areas, over one-third of people now work more than ten miles from the city center. 

Travel times are getting longer because our metropolitan areas are spreading out so much.

• New national figures show that commute times are longest for Americans who live in metropolitan areas, but outside the central city. Workers in these suburban areas spend an average of 26.9 minutes traveling to work, compared with 24.9 minutes by residents in central cities.  Less than three percent of these workers use transit to reach their jobs.  Within central cities, transit use is more than twice the national average:  10.5 percent of commuters in central cities use transit.  Average commuting times in central cities are slightly lower than the national average, at 24.8 minutes. Central cities are defined by the Census Bureau as the most populous cities within a metropolitan area. 
  

• The average reported commute time grew, even though people are overwhelmingly using the mode believed to be the fastest - the personal vehicle. And in some places, such as Atlanta, one of the most sprawling places in the nation, commute times grew a lot. Atlanta’s commute time grew by more than 5 minutes in the 1990s, but Atlantans are hardly happy with that fact: an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll last year found that 42 percent of residents ranked traffic as their chief concern, ahead of education and crime. 
  

• According to the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Inventory, spread-out, unplanned development accelerated during the 1990s.  From 1992-1997, an average of 2.2 million acres of former open space was developed every year -- more than 50 percent higher than the annual rate of development in (1.4 million acres) in 1982-1992.

Most Americans still have limited access to transit.

• Only 4 percent of the nation’s 4 million miles of roads are now served by transit, either through buses or parallel train lines.  While the American preference for driving is often repeated, a new Bureau of Transportation Statistics survey found that only 41 percent of non-transit users cited this reason for not taking the bus or train.  A higher percentage – 47 percent – said they did not use public transit because it was  unavailable for the destinations or times they were traveling.
  
  

• The lack of transportation choice is clear on the household level.  Almost 90 percent (89.7%) of American households have access to an automobile (according to the 2000 Census), and it would be reasonable to assume that almost all Americans have access to paved roads.  But less than half of all Americans (49%) report living within one-quarter mile of a transit stop, and only 8.3 percent of households surveyed have subway service available.
   

• For more information on highway capacity and transit capacity, see issues #2 and #3 of STPP’s Decoding Transportation Policy and Practice series, www.transact.org.

When transit service is convenient to work and home, people use it.

• Transit use varied dramatically based on availability.  In central cities, it is more than twice the national average, at 10.5 percent.  Outside of metropolitan areas, transit use is less than one percent.
  
  

• Most people are driving because they have few options.  Looking at the places that have reliable transit services, the overall numbers are much higher.  In the urbanized areas with the 19 largest transit agencies, the percentage of commuters taking transit quadruples to 13.1 percent.
  
  

• The new Census data shows that transit use is high in some suburban places, such as Arlington, VA (24%), and Silver Spring, MD (23.4%).  This is because transit service exists, and has been successfully integrated into the fabric of development.  Other suburban areas with high transit use include Winnetka, Illinois on the north side of Chicago (27%), and El Cerrito, CA (22%).

Spending on transit infrastructure has increased, but is still dwarfed by highway spending.

• Over the decade of the 1990s, the federal government put $156 billion in federal funds into building new highways and repairing old ones, while spending a total of $44 billion on transit.
  
  

• For more information on federal spending patterns, see Changing Direction: Federal Transportation Spending in the 1990s.

The documented growth in transit use is not captured in the new Census Journey to Work data.

• The new Census figures show a smaller portion of commuters used transit to get to work in 2000, down to 4.7 percent from 5.3 percent in 1990, with absolute numbers remaining essentially flat.   Yet over the last six years, total transit use has shot up 23 percent, outpacing the growth in driving (see ‘Transit Growing Faster Than Driving, www.transact.org). This disparity is the result of the limits of the Census dataset.  The Census Journey-to-Work numbers represent only a portion of all trips via transit: less than half of all transit trips are for work.  More importantly, transit’s resurgence began in 1996 following years of decline.  Declining ridership early in the decade meant that the total ridership growth from 1990 to 2000 came to 6.4 percent, despite strong growth at the end of the decade and in 2001. 
  

• Improvements in transit infrastructure made possible by new federal funding that began in 1992 have not had time to significantly change commuting or development patterns. Many transit systems opened new lines in the late 1990s.  While these systems showed instant growth,  they have not reached maturity.

The Limits of the Journey to Work data.

• The Census Journey-to-Work data only covers work trips, which make up about 20 percent of all trips.  About 46 percent of transit trips are for purposes other than the trip to work.
  

• A recent survey by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics showed that many Americans use transit for occasional trips, which do not appear in the Journey-to-Work data. In a May 2002 survey of 1015 households, 14 percent of U.S. adults reported using transit at least once in the past month. When narrowed down to areas where transit is available, the numbers are even more striking: 22 percent, or more than one in five adults, used transit at least once in the past month.
  

• The JTW questionnaire only allows one answer for method to work, so those who use more than one method, such as walking and transit, must choose between them. In addition, the questionnaire asks for a snapshot of travel behavior in the spring.

The Census shows that more households own more cars; in fact automobile costs rival the cost of rent or mortgage for most Americans.

• According the to 2000 Census, 58.5 million households, 55.5 percent of all households, now own two or more vehicles.  This is up from about 50.3 million households (54.7%) in 1990.  An incredible 18 million households (17.1%) own three or more vehicles.  Americans owned more than 217 million cars and trucks, though there were only 190.6 million licensed drivers (from the Federal Highway Administration's, Highway Statistics Series 2000).
  
  

• People who live in places with fewer transportation choices spend more of their household budget on getting around. In 2000, the average household spent $7,118 on daily transportation, 18.7 percent of their total household budget. For example, in Houston, a place with few transportation choices, the average household spends $9,722 of its budget (21 percent), on transportation. 
  
  

• For more information, see Driven to Spend.

Better transit infrastructure is putting us one step forward.  But unplanned development is pulling us two steps back.

• Most development is still designed for the automobile, with little consideration of access via transit, walking, or other means. Even transit infrastructure has been designed more for cars than for direct access on foot.
  

• One example is in the Washington, DC region. Many jurisdictions have not taken advantage of the region’s transit infrastructure to locate new housing, jobs, shopping and services at Metro stations and in town centers where people can accomplish errands and other daily needs.  For example, Prince George's County in Maryland has 4 metro lines and 13 stations and little development at the Metro stations beyond an IRS building at the New Carrollton station.  Meanwhile Prince George's County residents who don't work in the District clog the Wilson Bridge and the Beltway getting to jobs and shopping in Northern Virginia and Montgomery County.   The movement of jobs to the fringes of the metro area have also had an impact on commuting patterns:  MCI/WorldCom’s location west of Dulles put thousands of workers on the roads, many of whom used to commute by metro to the MCI office at Farragut North. 

Special thanks to Smart Growth America, The Brookings Institution, The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Coalition for Smarter Growth, and the American Public Transportation Association, for their assistance in gathering statistics for this paper.