Commuting in America 2013 - Brief 13: Transit Commuting

This brief is the thirteenth in a series of briefs that constitute a body of knowledge describing commuting in America. This body of work, sponsored by American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and carried out in conjunction with a National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) project that provided supporting data, builds on three prior Commuting in America documents that were issued over the past three decades.

As noted in Brief 12, the auto boom appears to have completed its rapid growth cycle and has stabilized at very high levels, remaining the dominant mode. However, in the past decade or so, there are signs of auto communting retrenchment and evidence that transit has increased as a commuter mode. This brief presents data describing transit commuting trends and relationships. It should be noted that transit use, which hovers at around a 5 percent share for commuting, is more challenging to comprehensively analyze with statistically-significant-data due to its modest share and constraints of sample size in both American Community Survey (ACS) and National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) data sources.