(The following article by Patrick McGeehan was posted on the New York Times website on September 2.)
NEW YORK — A growing number of New Yorkers are deciding that if the trip to work takes more than a half-hour, then someone else can do the driving, a new survey by the Census Bureau shows.
In the metropolitan region, which for years has been home to the nation’s longest average commute, tens of thousands of workers have stopped driving to their jobs and switched to riding subways, trains, buses and ferries, according to an analysis of the data released this week by demographers at Queens College.
More than 2.5 million residents of the region — about 2 of every 7 commuters — regularly rode some form of public transportation to work in 2005, up from about 2.2 million in 2000. The share of commuters driving themselves or riding in private cars fell, a trend that could bode well for America’s energy consumption if only it were taking hold nationally.
Despite rising gasoline prices, nearly 9 of every 10 workers nationwide still travel to work by private car, said Phillip A. Salopek, a demographer at the Census Bureau. That number has been stuck at about 88 percent since 2000, Mr. Salopek said.
The latest figures reinforce just how unusual New York is in its reliance on public transportation. No other American city makes half as much use of mass transit. Of the 6.2 million transit riders in the country, more than 40 percent live in the metropolitan region, which, by the federal government’s definition, includes the city and 18 surrounding counties in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority and commuter train and bus operators have reported steady increases in ridership in the last two years, despite fare increases.
“The reason there’s much more of a noticeable shift in New York City is that there are alternatives,” said Charles Komanoff, a transportation consultant in Manhattan. “In the rest of the country, you don’t have much substitution; you can’t. In New York, you can and you do.”
The shift to mass transit is not saving New Yorkers any time, though. The average length of the trip to work for city residents was more than 39 minutes last year. In the region, the average trip was more than 33 minutes, down only slightly, if at all, since 2000.
“Transit tends to be slow, though it may be faster than being in a car in New York,” said Alan E. Pisarski, a transportation consultant who once lived in Queens and worked in Manhattan. Counting all the time spent getting to and from transit stations and waiting for trains and buses, he said, a trip by public transit generally takes twice as long as one in a car.
New York’s reliance on its transit systems explains why the boroughs other than Manhattan perennially top the list of American counties with the longest commutes. The average trip to work for residents of Staten Island, Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn has hovered above 40 minutes for several years.
Last year, Staten Islanders again faced the longest daily slog, a full 42 minutes on average, with average commutes from Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn just a minute or so less.
For Manhattan residents, the typical commute lasted about 31 minutes, still considerably longer than the national average of about 25 minutes.
Throughout the region, whites were more likely than other racial groups to drive or ride a train. Two-thirds of those who traveled to work by car and 60 percent of train riders were white.
But the train riders were more educated and better paid. More than 60 percent of rail commuters had college degrees compared with about 40 percent of drivers and subway riders.
The average income of rail commuters in the region was about $105,000, more than double the income of the typical subway and bus riders.
Washington and the surrounding suburbs in Maryland and Virginia rival New York for long commutes, with a few counties in that region showing average trips to work taking more than 40 minutes. But, if the census figures are to be believed, there is one place in America that is the capital of hard-core commuting: Coweta County in Georgia.
Residents of Coweta County, a fast-developing slice of suburbia south of Atlanta, spent an average of more than 51 minutes getting to work last year, almost 10 minutes longer than the typical commute in any other county in the country, according to the survey results released this week.
That finding surprised officials there. Mitchell W. Seabaugh, a Georgia state senator who represents the county, said he knew that a lot of his constituents drove long distances to work around the Atlanta area, but he said the traffic there could not compare with big-city congestion.
“I’ve been in Los Angeles and it doesn’t seem like it matters what time of day it is there, you’re in stop-and-go traffic,” Mr. Seabaugh said while driving on Wednesday.
But Brady Tillman Jr., a newcomer to Newnan, Ga., the Coweta County seat, said he believed the census data was accurate.
“The traffic’s just horrible, horrible,” said Mr. Tillman, 39, who drives 46 miles each way from his home to his job as an adviser at the Buckhead campus of American InterContinental University on the north side of Atlanta.
Mr. Tillman, who moved to Newnan from Miami two months ago, has been searching in vain for a mass-transit alternative to his hourlong trip to work. He said he has been leaving home at 6:30 a.m. to beat the traffic, although he does not have to be at work before 8 a.m.
“I come from a big city where the traffic is horrible, and I’m shocked,” Mr. Tillman said.