Mean Commute Time
How long the tract's commuters spend travelling to work, as an average one-way time and as the share facing a trip of thirty minutes or more.
How long the people who live in a tract spend getting to work.
The Census Bureau defines travel time to work as "the total number of minutes that it usually took the worker to get from home to work during the reference week," and adds that "the elapsed time includes time spent waiting for public transportation, picking up passengers in carpools, and time spent in other activities related to getting to work." Mean travel time is "the average travel time that workers usually took to get from home to work (one way) during the reference week" (ACS Subject Definitions).
The universe is workers aged 16 and over who did not work at home. People who worked at home are outside both measures below, so neither figure is diluted by remote work — but neither reflects how common remote work has become either. For that, see commute mode.
Commute time is measured by where the worker lives, not where the job is. It describes the burden borne by residents of the tract.
Metrics in this family#
Mean commute time
levelAverage one-way travel time to work, in minutes, among tract residents who commute.
The Bureau publishes travel time for census tracts as a distribution across time bands rather than as a single average, so the figure shown here is our own estimate derived from that published distribution. The Bureau is the source of the original data only.
Long-commute rate
levelThe share of commuters whose usual one-way trip takes thirty minutes or more.
An average can be pulled upward by a small number of very long trips. A share above a fixed threshold instead counts how many people face one, and the two measures can point in different directions in the same tract.
Considerations#
Travel time is reported by the respondent as a usual one-way duration, not measured. It does not distinguish mode, route, time of day, or whether the trip crosses a congested corridor, and it captures no trip other than the one to work.
The top published time band is open-ended, so the average cannot fully reflect the very longest commutes.
ACS 5-year windows overlap. Each vintage shares four of its five years with the vintage before it, so movement between adjacent vintages reflects smoothed rolling estimates rather than independent annual readings.
Census tract boundaries were redrawn for the 2020 census. Estimates published on earlier boundaries are carried onto current ones before use — see geography.
Both measures rest on the commuting workers in a tract. Where that group is small — because the tract has few residents, few workers, or a high share working at home — the estimate carries a wide margin of error.
References#
- 1ACS Subject Definitionshttps://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/tech_docs/subject_definitions/2024_ACSSubjectDefinitions.pdf