CityLab has posted a new article with several maps about how Americans commute to work. There is sociological variation in the data. For instance, “(e)ducation is [a] piece in the picture of how Americans get to work. People are less likely to drive to work alone and to use alternate modes in metros where more adults are college graduates…. The same basic pattern holds for class. Across metros, the share of workers who are members of the knowledge-based creative class is positively associated with using transit (0.56), biking (0.62), or walking (0.56) to get to work, as well as working from home (0.50), and it is negatively associated with driving alone to work (-0.44), and the same holds for the local concentration of high-tech industry jobs. But the reverse is true for the working class. Across metros, a higher concentration of working-class jobs is positively associated with driving alone to work (0.36) and negatively associated with using transit (-0.48), biking (-0.39), and walking to work (0.32).”
The article concludes with “[w]e are cleaving into two nations—one where people’s daily lives revolve around the car, and the other where the car is receding in favor of alternative modes like walking, biking, and transit. Little wonder that bike lanes have emerged as a symbol of gentrification and ‘the war on cars’ has become a way to call out the so-called urban elite.”