OK, here's our final ACS chart:
I did this one out of my usual curiosity about whether it would gibe with the rise of working from home during the pandemic. It's still hard to tell.
Clearly, commutes in big cities did go down when the pandemic started. But not by much: a grand total of 54 seconds by 2023. This is less than 3%.
What does this mean? On the one hand, that's only back to 2017 levels. On the other hand, we have 15 million more workers than we did in 2017. On the third hand, we supposedly have more than 15 million people who have abandoned the workplace in favor of working from home.
So . . . it's still a mystery. I still don't think commuting patterns match up very well with reports of how empty office buildings are, but no one seems very interested in trying to reconcile this.
How do you know my commute to work time / frequency? Oh...google maps? Or what?
Kevin is pulling results from the ACS - a survey of people. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs I presume.
I’m not sure why these are considered accurate. Thanks.
Still, I wonder if google maps knows my commuting patterns. Probably on some level.
What is the exact question they ask? My husband’s commute is the same as before covid (45 min) but he only goes in one or two days a week. so is his commute 45 min, or do we average it? (1.5 days commuting 45 min, 3.5 commuting zero = 13.5 min average per day)
I don’t think “commute time” is a good measure anymore.
This looks like it is exactly the right question.
This. They basically don't count work at home.
It's undoubtedly this. The questions are probably the same ones asked pre-2020 (so that the chart can have continuity from pre- to post-pandemic). And the ones asked pre-2020 were phrased something like:
1. Did you commute today? Yes or no.
2. If yes, how long did you commute today?
And then the analysis assumes that every respondent does the same thing every "workday," which was pretty accurate in the pre-2020 era, but not at all accurate in the post-2020 era.
But unfortunately, there isn't a great way to fix this problem if you want to compare pre- and post-pandemic transportation patterns. You can create more complex surveys that ask about every day of "your typical week" independently, which more people will just ignore (so your sample becomes less representative of the entire population) because there's a time cost to answering surveys.
And even if you solve for that problem, what do you do with the data you collected to compare it to pre-2020? After the 31.1 minutes on that chart, you would need to map out 5 separate lines for each of the 5 weekdays, and explain that "well for 2021, on Mondays commute times fell to 30.3 minutes but on Wednesdays they rose to 32.2 minutes and by Fridays they were all the way down to 28.7 minutes." And then keep repeating that same nuanced description for each year as some days go up, some go down and some go up-and-down as both employees and employers keep switching up the number and order of days that workers must go into the office.
Based on the questions used, his commute would still be 45 minutes per day just as if he commuted every day.
If he worked from home every day, he would not be included in the commute calculation at all.
Public transit took a big hit. A lot of former transit riders are likely driving now, due initially to avoiding covid, and later just continuing because the commute is slightly better than before.
The office buildings were emptying out before the pandemic. James Altucher noted back in 2015 that offices were emptying out through remote work and automation as a cautionary tale to not assume your job would be there forever.
Only someone not paying attention hasn't figured out that "Return to Office" is a way to reduce headcount without having to offer severance packages. I get that for young people, the office is a social network and singles bar. But for us older workers who just want to get shit done and go live our lives, the office is a painful waste of time both on commutes and socializing.
Commutes really do suck, especially when they're uncompensated (as they almost always are), and I personally resent having to go back to the office simply to justify the CEO's decision to build a brand-new building in 2023, despite seeing how all of us were able to work from home at no cost to the company for 3 years. Return to Office is definitely a shittification ploy to get more people to self-deport... I mean, quit.
This older worker prefers the office.
Me, too. After a decade of working from home, it became very apparent just how much information isn't shared when you are only getting info via boring emails and painful Zoom meetings.
I didn't say All older workers 😀
I know a lot of people like the feel of dressing up and going into the office, it blends with their style.
If you aren't a social person to begin with and do your best work in pajamas and a bathrobe, the office turns into hell. I get that grabbing coffee with peers and especially more senior folks is a way to build tighter teams, but if you don't need to be a team?
I advocate that people should work the way that produces the best final product - that can be in the office in full suit and tie or in shorts on a beach in the Bahamas. The point is to be productive.
Commuting and commute time are different things. The first should have dropped, the second - not so much.
On recent trips back to Boston visiting folks at my old haunts, the buildings were simultaneously empty, but there weren't enough desks as usual. Basically people were doing remote work at least 3 days a week, more typically 4 days/week, but whenever they did come in they expected a guarantee that their desk was sitting there waiting for them.
The buildings no longer had the coffee cart/lunch cart there for morning and afternoon, and they could have gotten rid of 2/3 of the desks. The latter, however, only if folks actually coordinated who came in when, or if the desks were used as flex spaces.
As for the commute times, shouldn't the comparison be made to the extrapolation? Commutes were going up and up (my Boston commute was only getting worse each year; and the windows of time during which I could minimize it were shrinking). The current value seems a good 3 minutes less than it would have been if the trends continued.
this definitely does NOT match my experience driving from Pasadena to Hollywood since well prior to the pandemic. without any traffic, this is a 30 minute drive. with bad traffic, it's somewhat over an hour.
for most of 2022, 2023, it was easily 20-30% faster, especially on the way home. it's worse since then, but doesn't seem as bad as prepandemic, but I'm open to the fact I might be misremembering
My short commute has no traffic delays… ever. I guess if there was an accident on the interstate I would have a delay, but that’s it. It doesn’t matter what time of day I travel. So unless I work from home, there is no change. Thursday was snowy so the interstate traffic (all 10 of us) was going 40 mph.
Mine dropped to zero because I retired. Never looked back. Livin' the dream.
There's this really weird phenomenon to commutes where the mornings are staggered so they're less busy but the afternoons are compressed and so they're almost always the same, bumper to bumper. I'd speculate that people are relating to their afternoon commutes.
There are more non-commuters driving in the afternoon than the morning. I am one of them a couple of times a week. People out shopping, going somewhere for the evening, etc.