Transit’s Ride into Irrelevance

Just 3.5 percent of American workers commuted to work by public transit in 2023, according to American Community Survey data recently released by the Census Bureau. That’s down from 5.0 percent in 2019. Since transit ridership so far in 2024 is only about 4 percent more (when measured as a share of 2019 numbers) than it was in 2023, the 3.5 percent number is not likely to improve much in the future.

The increase in remote working has permanently shifted transportation patterns and particularly devastated transit ridership.

According to the survey data, the share of people working at home in 2023 was 13.8 percent, down from 15.2 percent in 2022 but up from just 5.7 percent in 2019. As I’ve noted before, the increase in remote working has a double impact on transit ridership. First, the downtown workers who were transit’s main customers before the pandemic are more likely to work at home than many other people. Second, the reduction in congestion resulting from increased remote working will lead some people who were avoiding congestion by riding transit to return to driving.

The survey data also tosses out the window the notion that spending money on transit is more equitable than spending it on roads. According to table B08119, people earning under $25,000 a year were more likely to drive alone to work than people earning more than $75,000 a year. People earning under $25,000 a year were also more likely to carpool than people in any income category above $25,000 a year. While low-income workers were also more likely to ride transit, the difference was small: about 4.0 percent of low-income workers vs. 3.5 percent of all workers commuted by transit.

Although congestion isn’t quite as bad as it was before the pandemic, working-class workers are most likely to get stuck in traffic as they are not as free to work at home or work flex-time hours. The needs of the 78 percent of low-income people who rely on autos to get to work should outweigh those of the 4 percent who ride transit.

The data also show that less than 30 percent of people who have no vehicles in their households relied on transit to get to work. More than 26 percent drove alone (mainly in employer-supplied vehicles) and nearly 10 percent carpooled, so people without their own vehicles still rely more on automobiles to get to work than on transit. In many places, driving alone greatly outnumbered transit among workers with no vehicles.

Downloading census data can be a pain, so since I’ve already done it for the nation, states, counties, cities, and urban areas, I’ve posted the files to save you time. Specifically, table B08301 has basic travel to work data; table B08119 has journey-to-work data broken down by income; and table B08141 has journey-to-work data broken down by the number of vehicles owned by the household. In addition to the raw data in the lefthand cells, the files include percent data in the righthand cells.