According to census data, about 4 percent of American workers–5.9 million–live in households that have no automobiles. Conventional wisdom suggests that these are people who are either too poor to own a vehicle, and we should pity them; or people who for environmental or other reasons have learned to live without a vehicle, and we should admire them.
There may be a third category, however. As demographer Wendell Cox recently discovered, table B08141 from the Census Bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey shows how people get to work by how many vehicles they have in their household. It turns out that nearly 1.2 million people who have no vehicles nevertheless drive to work in a single-occupancy vehicle. That represents 20 percent of workers with no vehicles. Another 730,000, or more than 12 percent of people with no vehicles, carpool to work.
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I wondered if most of these people were in a few places such as New York City, so I created and downloaded a table B08141 file for all states and urbanized areas. While there are some variations, no place stands out as having a particularly high percentage of workers with no vehicles driving alone to work. The highest is Puerto Rico at 2.6 percent (but Puerto Rico isn’t included in the 1.2 million).
In any case, it sounds as though the number of workers who are so poor that they can’t afford an automobile is much smaller than we thought–no more than 4.8 million and probably much less considering that many of those 4.8 million may be able to afford cars but decided not to own one.
As someone who uses the Autoless households ACS data (along with persons with disability [Census only, not available from ACS], low income, elderly, youth [13-15], and population density) as demographic analysis to help determine demand for transit, I can tell you that the planners I know understand what you discuss and work it into the narrative of their plans.
The amount of Autoless households that have individuals that use an auto to get to work may even go beyond your analysis above. Slug lines, hitchhiking (still used in the mountain west), Cars2go/SMART cars, rental cars, non-“company” cars given by employers (think nanny).
Regardless of all of these factors, areas with a concentration of autoless households do indicate a level of transit demand.
Carsharing may be part of the answer, although certainly not accounting for over a million households. As mentioned in the post, there probably are also some people who don’t own a car but use a company car frequently.
I agree that it is likely company cars or proximity to work and services/transit – location efficiency or a low Housing+Transportation Efficiency Index – that is the main reason.
DS
What about students? They may “commute” but not own their vehicle?
Tombdragon,
Students are not included in these numbers; only workers. And the question is not whether a worker owns a vehicle but whether there are vehicles in the worker’s household. When we say 5.9 million workers have no access to vehicles, we mean no one in the workers’ households owns or leases a vehicle.
bennett,
As noted in the post, slug lines simply can’t be that significant of an influence, because the DC metro area does not score particularly high on this metric at all (0.82%), nor does San Francisco (0.97%), both behind such metro areas as Wilmington NC, Waco TX, Scranton PA, or Syracuse NY.
I can see company cars plus rental cars for a number of people, particular those in sales or otherwise with a lot of company travel.