"For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering."
- Daniel Kahneman, Princeton emeritus professor and Nobel laureate
"It must be awfully frustrating to get a small raise at work and then have it all eaten by a higher cost of commuting."
- Ben Bernanke, former Federal Reserve chairman
Raise your hand if your commute time is shorter now than 10 years ago. While we can’t speak for all CoStar clients, we’re guessing it’s not a lot of you. There’s a bit of a commute time problem across the U.S. right now. As one glaring example, a recent Wall Street Journal video on the value of tech industry clustering noted how major cities seem to be hitting capacity, with congestion and affordability a concern in major tech hubs.
A longer commute is not just annoying, it actually leads to a loss in general life satisfaction. And it is also a serious headwind to productivity, which is something economists have cited as a major factor holding back U.S. economic growth in recent decades.
The chart below shows the nationwide distribution of commute times in 2010, the blue bars, and 2018, the red bars. As you can see, there has been a drop in those who can get to work in under 25 minutes and an increase in those who spend more time traveling, especially those whose commutes last 45 minutes to an hour and a half. In raw terms, about 30 million Americans now commute 45 minutes or more to work each way.
What’s driving this population shift toward longer commutes? It certainly runs counter to the popular perception that everyone, particularly the oft-cited millennials, want to live downtown. Let’s dig in.
Populations grow. Well, most of them, but especially during a prolonged economic recovery like the one we've seen since 2010. How a city distributes its growing population gives insight into its capacity. One good tell for a city struggling to handle growth well is an increase in the number of people who travel 45 minutes or more, who we’ll call super commuters.
To back-test this idea, we took a look at 2010’s share of super commuters for the 25 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S. and subsequent population growth to 2018.
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It’s not perfectly predictive, but there is a clear negative correlation, suggesting that cities with an already high share of super commuters couldn’t grow as fast. Most of the cities you see on the right side of the chart above are the established, already dense metros of the Northeast and Midwest. We then conducted the analysis another way: How does population growth influence commute times? The chart below looks at population growth in those same cities from 2010-2018 along with the percent increase in super commuters over that same period. We find this a more interesting view, offering a glimpse of who has absorbed growth well.
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Here we see a positive correlation, as you’d expect: Rapidly growing cities typically struggle to keep up with the infrastructure investment necessary to ease commuting stress.
Our outliers in each test are similar: Riverside, Atlanta, Phoenix and Denver have all seen rapid growth while efficiently handling that growth. On the other hand, St. Louis, Philadelphia and Baltimore have all seen very little growth, but still a larger increase in super commuters.
Let’s have some fun and compare some cities.
Below we see how Philadelphia has seen an outright decline in 0-14 minute commuters, while Minnesota has found space for most of its growth fitting in the less-than-35 minute commute buckets.
