A new website created by artist and urban planner Neil Freeman lets users view information about commutes from the Census’s 2014 Five-Year American Community Survey. Some interesting findings uncovered:
Eighty percent of Americans drive alone to work, and there is a tendency to think of most people’s commuting options as being driving or transit.
However, the Census tract in Langley Park, in Maryland right outside D.C., contains the year-old Takoma-Langley Transit Center and has a 50 percent carpooling mode share, with 21 percent of commuters using public transit and 24 percent of commuters driving alone. (Only 2 percent of Americans live in tracts with lower percentages of commuters driving alone.)
I’d be interested to find out more about why the rate of carpooling is so high in Langley Park.
Presumably part of the answer is that the area is both poor and very dense, so many residents likely don’t own their own cars and live near people who work in the same area as them.
However, the fact that nearly two-and-a-half times as many people carpool as ride public transit in an area served by a number of bus routes and a newly-built bus station seems to indicate that bus service in the area is not effectively serving residents. Hopefully the Purple Line, which will have a stop at the transit center, will help with this.
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