Commute mode
The share of a tract's workers who usually travel to work on foot, by bicycle, or by public transportation, and the share who work from home.
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How the people who live in a tract usually get to work.
The Census Bureau defines means of transportation to work as "the principal mode of travel or type of conveyance that the worker usually used to get from home to work during the reference week." Workers who used different means on different days were asked "to specify the one they used most often," and workers who combined modes in a single trip were asked "to report the one used for the longest distance during the work trip" (ACS Subject Definitions).
The universe is workers aged 16 and over. It includes people who worked at home, who form their own category alongside the travel modes.
Mode shares describe the tract where workers live, not where they work. A high transit share means residents commute by transit, which usually implies both that service exists and that destinations are reachable on it.
Metrics in this family#
Considerations#
Each share is measured against all workers aged 16 and over, including those who worked at home. Because working at home competes with every travel mode for the same denominator, a tract where remote work is common will show lower walk, bike and transit shares than its travelling commuters alone would suggest, and shifts in remote work move all three shares together.
Only the principal mode of a single trip is recorded. A worker who walks to a station and then rides a train is counted once, under the mode covering the longest distance, so short walking and cycling legs of longer trips are invisible here.
Walking and cycling are small shares almost everywhere, which makes them proportionally noisier than transit: a change of a handful of surveyed workers can move a tract's estimate appreciably.
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.
In tracts with few workers the estimate rests on a small sample and carries a wide margin of error.
References#
- 1ACS Subject Definitionshttps://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/tech_docs/subject_definitions/2024_ACSSubjectDefinitions.pdf