More than three times as many people worked at home in 2021 as in 2019, according to data that was released yesterday by the Census Bureau. While this isn’t surprising, the increase in telecommuting had an outsized impact on transit commuting, which declined by more than 50 percent. For comparison, the number of people driving alone to work declined by only 12 percent.
These numbers are from the American Community Survey, a questionnaire that the Census Bureau has sent to about 3.5 million households each year since 2005. Due to the pandemic, the Census Bureau did not do a complete survey in 2020. However, 2021 data are directly comparable to 2019 numbers to get an indication of changes due to the pandemic.
The survey produces more than 1,500 tables about population, race, incomes, housing, commuting, education, and other information. Today, I’ll focus on tables B08103, “Means of Transportation to Work,” B08119, “Means of Transportation to Work by Workers’ Earnings in the Past 12 Months,” B08141, “Means of Transportation to Work by Vehicles in Household,” and B25044, “Tenure by Vehicles in Household.” I’ll write about other tables in future posts.
Nearly 7.8 million people took transit to work in 2019 while 9.0 million worked at home. In 2021, transit commuters dropped to 3.8 million as telecommuting rose to 27.6 million.
High-income people were much more likely to switch to working at home in 2021. Almost a third of people earning more than $75,000 a year and more than a fifth of those earning $65,000 to $75,000 telecommuted in 2021, while only about 12 percent of those earning under $25,000 worked at home.
Still, transit commuting dropped at all income levels. About 65 percent fewer people earning more than $75,000 commuted by transit in 2021 than in 2019, while the share of those earning less than $25,000 who commuted by transit dropped by more than 40 percent.
Transit agencies have long argued that they helped low-income people get to work, but the number of low-income people who took transit to work actually declined between 2010 and 2019, while the number of high-income transit commuters grew. As a result, by 2017, the median income of transit commuters was higher than for any other type of commuters. Only people who worked at home had higher median incomes.
The pandemic changed that as high-income transit commuters were most likely to shift to telecommuting. In 2019, the median income of transit commuters was more than $42,000. By 2021, it had dropped to $35,000 even as overall median incomes grew from $40,000 to nearly $43,000.
That doesn’t mean that large numbers of low-income people remain dependent on transit. In 2019, 5.0 percent of people earning under $25,000 a year took transit to work, or about 2.4 million people. In 2021 just 3.0 percent or 1.3 million low-income people relied on transit, a decline of more than a million.
Some of those people worked at home but a lot of them bought cars. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of households without access to a vehicle declined by more than 300,000, while the number with two or more vehicles grew by 2.9 million. More pertinently, the number of people with jobs that had no vehicles in their households declined by more than 400,000, while the number who had no vehicles in their households but nonetheless drove alone to work (probably in vehicles supplied by their employers) grew by nearly 140,000. Those two changes could explain more than half the decline in low-income transit commuters.
For those who are interested in the data for their state, county, city, or urban area, I’ve posted a spreadsheet that compares 2021 with 2019 commuting data by income (table B08119). Data for 2021 are in rows 3 through 65; data for 2019 are in rows 69 through 131; the differences are in rows 134 through 196. The percent of each income class that takes each mode of transportation to work for 2021 is in rows 199 through 252 while 2019 is in rows 255 through 308. The percentage change of each category is in rows 311 through 373.
The United States is column B (with estimated margin of error in column C). States are columns D through CZ; counties in DB through BPV; cities in BPX through DLR; and urban areas in DLT through ETH. The Census Bureau only reports numbers that have reasonable margins of errors, so many cities and counties are excluded and the numbers for some are simply zeros.
Preparing this spreadsheet was rather time consuming. I’ll post similar spreadsheets comparing 2019 and 2021 data for other tables as I have time.
Something I’ve not thought of before — Over time, automobiles have become more reliable and long-lasting which should be good for those buying “used” with limited means. While public transportation still means standing in the cold and rain while waiting for the bus (what I remember most about using public transportation) hasn’t changed.
And a car is used for more than commuting to work — shopping, recreation, taking the kids to little Bobby’s birthday party.
Utility.
It’s almost as if the primary focus of transit agencies was a subsidy to middle class folks working downtown.
The decline in transit…
Primarily leftists attribute to land use planning…. partially true…. it’s kinda hard to walk anywhere when you have to cross a busy freeway just to buy a soda.
Since public transit primarily serves city centers, this from the CEO of McDonalds (based in the Loop) looks bad for public transit …
McDonald’s Corp. calls Chicago home, with its corporate headquarters and some 400 restaurants, but CEO Chris Kempczinski issued a frank warning Wednesday about the city’s crime and social deterioration. “Everywhere I go I am confronted by the same question these days: ‘What’s going on in Chicago?’ . . . There is a general sense out there that our city is in crisis,” he said, and he’s right.
The fast-food chain moved its headquarters to the Loop from the suburbs in 2018, and Mr. Kempczinski estimates its economic contribution to the city at $2 billion a year. But lawlessness is taking a toll. “It’s felt most significantly every single day in the restaurants,” he told the Economic Club of Chicago. “We have violent crime that is happening in our restaurants . . . we are seeing homelessness issues in our restaurants, we are having drug overdoses that are happening in our restaurants.”
https://on.wsj.com/3xulknI
(more at the link)
Despite all the mounting evidence that transit is dead and getting deader, I still go to public hearings where seemingly intelligent people stand up and say that, instead of widening congested intercity highways, “we should invest more money in intracity buses and light rail.”
Why are downtowns so essential when business districts can be anywhere. Jersey City is just a town built mainly serve needs where too expensive to do business in New York….. Silver Springs, DC……
Developers will build whole cities just to mitigate cost of cities
“ … we should invest more money in intracity buses and light rail.”
But once someone gets off an “intracity bus” they need some means of local transportation to get to their ultimate destination. This is not a problem with privately owned automobiles.
And … two of the things I remember most from my experiment with downtown apartment living were standing on a corner in the freezing winter mornings and sweltering summer afternoons waiting for the bus. Then there was the time a co-worker had to hang on to a utility pole between busses during an early-morning winter-storm commute. I gave her a ride home that afternoon.
Telecommuting is everything that transit advocates claim is good about transit (especially environmental benefits) – and much more – including something transit cannot do – almost zero out the travel time from home to work, regardless of how far home is from work (I know someone that lives roughly 500 miles from the office, yet is as productive as ever).