commute

Wall Street Journal Gets US Commute Times Wrong

Wendell Cox — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 18:27:31 -0500

A March 1, 2023 article entitled As Americans Work From Home, Europeans and Asians Head Back to the Office appeared as the lead in the Wall Street Journal’s “In Today’s Paper” internet newsletter. The article noted:

“Suburban sprawl means many Americans have longer, more tedious commutes plagued by worsening traffic jams—another reason to stay home. While a number of European cities also have long average commutes, New York and Chicago are unmatched, according to mobility-services company Moovit Inc. Public-transit systems in Europe and Asia are often more reliable and less prone to delays, making it easier to get to work.”

I submitted a comment to The Wall Street Journal disputing this paragraph, which was about the 505th on the list.

“On the contrary, US commuting times are generally lower than elsewhere in the world, unlike indicated in this article. See for example: https://www.newgeography.com/content/002217-the-transportation-politics-envy-the-united-states-europe. The article only cites transit commuting times, when in most major urban areas a sizeable share of commuting is by car, which is generally faster than transit. The keys to the shorter commute times in the US are greater use of cars and dispersed employment. Lower densities (pejoratively referred to as sprawl) do not increase commute times, they reduce them (https://fcpp.org/files/1/PS135_Transit_MY15F3.pdf, table 8).

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.

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.

30-Minute Commute Access: Theoretical and Actual

Wendell Cox — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 15:05:53 -0400

For some years, the University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory has produced major metropolitan area job access estimates for the average worker, at various trip lengths and modes. Estimates are provided for all the nation’s 53 major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 million), with the exception of Grand Rapids, Rochester and Tucson.

The data indicate auto access to jobs is far greater by car than by transit. This is shown below at the 30-minute job access level, which is slightly more than the average one-way work trip travel time of 28 minutes (about 60% of US workers reached work in 30 minutes), according to the American Community Survey (not counting people who work at home, who have no work trip travel time). At the median, cars can access, on average, 57.7 times as many jobs (5,770% as many jobs) as transit within 30 minutes.

The following table shows auto 30-minute access to jobs in relation to 30-minute access by transit, in terms of auto commuters per transit commuter. The table also indicates actual commuting patterns, express in the actual number of 30-minute auto commuters per 30-minute transit commuter, again from the 2019 American Community Survey. There is a strong correlation between the modeled 30-minute job access and the actual 30 minute commute data (0.686, statistically significant at the 99% level of confidence).

View or download a PDF of the table (link opens in new tab)

Finally, transit ridership has plummeted during the pandemic and has recovered far more slowly than other modes of transport, including driving and air (which are now between 80% and 100% of their pre-pandemic levels as well as Amtrak and transit, which are between 50% and 60% of their previous levels, according to Randal O’Toole. With the future of transit ridership uncertain, especially due to the massive increase in hybrid and remote working and a residual fear of proximity (infection), the car advantage could widen.

More Criticism of the Mythical Shift to Transit

Wendell Cox — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 15:50:52 -0400

There has been additional attention to the exaggeration of transit ridership trends claimed by the American Public Transit Association. Writing in The Washington Post, David King of Columbia University. Michael Manville of Cornell University and Michael Smart of Rutgers University said that the "association’s numbers are deceptive" and that the "interpretation is wrong.” Noting their strong support of public transportation, King, Manville and Smart said that "misguided optimism about transit’s resurgence helps neither transit users nor the larger traveling public." They further say that "there is no national transit boom."

They examine the data by metropolitan area and find that "transit use outside New York declined in absolute terms last year, and conclude that this "fact shows how crucial public transportation is to our largest city and how small a role it plays in most other Americans’ lives.

Also see: No Fundamental Shift, Not Even a Shift.

BBC Monster Traffic Jam List Includes Lexington, Kentucky? Really?

Wendell Cox — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 09:37:59 -0400

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has just published a list of 10 "monster commutes" around the world. Some are to be expected, and are usually found on any list of extreme traffic congestion, such as Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila, Mumbai, Seoul, Nairobi and Dhaka.

Lexington? However, reading further it becomes clearer that the BBC story deserves its own exhibit in the "Ripley's Don't Believe It" Room at the British Museum. BBC lists Lexington, Kentucky as one of 10 with "monster traffic jams." At first I thought BBC might have listed the wrong "L" place, having intended to cite Lagos or Lima instead. Not so, however since BBC quotes a Lexington commuter who claims to have spent an hour commuting to work one morning.

That, surely is not the experience of the average Lexington resident. According to the United States Census Bureau, the average work trip travel time, one way, in the Lexington metropolitan area is 21 minutes. This compares to the US national average of approximately 25 minutes. Researchers David Hartgen and M. Gregory Fields estimated the excess travel time during peak hour in Lexington at five percent in 2003 (traffic congestion has not become serious enough to warrant the attention of the long-standing Texas Transportation Institute's congestion reporting system). A quick review of data supplied by INRIX suggests that about 150 out of more than 180 rated US, European and Canadian metropolitan areas have worse traffic congestion than Lexington.

Austin? Perhaps a stronger case can be made for the inclusion of Austin, Texas on the list. But even so, Austin barely makes the most congested quarter of the INRIX international list. Austin's worse than average traffic congestion is the result of its late development an express roadway system, as this metropolitan area of the nearly 2,000,000 population was the last in the nation to connect two freeways together.

BBC's Austin commuter is quoted as indicating that he commutes by car, for which "I castigate myself daily." He continues: “I see two things that make me feel both guilty and shocked. A vacant city bus inching along my route and an empty tram cutting across traffic at 5pm." He misses the point. If the city bus is a vacant and the tram is empty, it is because they do not meet the needs of a sufficient number of customers (needs, which by the way can only be defined by consumers, not planners).

The proof is the crowded buses and trains that converge on six large downtown areas in the United States, where 40 percent to 75 percent of commuters use transit. This is not because the people who work south of 59th Street in Manhattan, in Chicago's Loop, or the downtown areas of Philadelphia, Washington, Boston or San Francisco have more effectively managed their guilt than the Austin commuter. It is rather because transit meets their needs. Commuters are rational. They take the mode of transport that best suits their needs. Transit's market shares around the country (many of them miniscule) speak volumes about how well transit meets the needs of potential customers.

Finally, BBC's Austin commuter claims that it takes 45 minutes to drive three kilometers (2 miles) to work (walking would be as fast for most people). It is hard to imagine a more unrepresentative commute in Austin. According to the United States Census Bureau, the average one way commute in Austin in 2011 was 26 minutes. Somehow 85 percent of Austin commuters get to work in less time than the Austin commuter, and they travel a lot farther.