Southern California leads the nation in super commuting, defined as taking 90 minutes or longer to get to work. What’s your commute?
Census department data is stale but interesting. There are 3.7 million super commuters, up from 2021 but down vs the pre-pandemic, work in the office standard.
The U.S. Added Nearly 600,000 Super Commuters in 2022
Apartment List reports The U.S. Added Nearly 600,000 Super Commuters in 2022
New data from the US Census Bureau shows a growing number of Americans are spending at least 90 minutes each way traveling to and from work, a practice known as “super-commuting.” This trend isn’t new; super-commuting was a growing problem throughout the 2010s, as metropolitan areas grew outward and workers moved further from job centers in search of affordable housing and homeownership. From 2010 to 2019, the super-commuting rate rose from 2.4 percent of the nation’s workforce to 3.1 percent. At its peak, 4.6 million workers were enduring three-plus hours of commuting daily.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided a brief respite, eliminating commutes for many and reducing commute times for the rest as traffic abated. As the economy went remote, the number of super commuters fell by over 1.5 million even as demand for suburban and exurban living remained strong.
But 2022 brought a resumption of the earlier trend. Remote work remained popular, but a shift back towards in-office work meant 10 million more workers commuted compared to 2021. Consequently, the number of super-commuters jumped by nearly 600,000 year-over-year. This is the largest single-year jump on record, and while still well short of the peak, it brings the total number of super-commuters back to 3.7 million.
Super Commuter Rates by County
The nationwide super-commuting rate is 2.7 percent, but double-digit rates can be found along the peripheries of several large metros in California and Texas, as well as Seattle, New York, and Washington DC.
300,000 Super-Commuters in Southern California
The nation’s highest super-commuter rate can be found in Palmdale, a 60-mile drive from Los Angeles, where 16.9 percent of all workers commute at least 90 minutes for work. Additionally, super-commuter rates in Victorville, Apple Valley, Hesperia, and Lake Elsinore all rank in the national top 10. Several other cities in the region have super-commuting rates that are more than double the national average of 2.7 percent. Connected to Los Angeles by traffic-snarled freeways and limited transit options, workers in these cities must tolerate long commutes in order to access the higher wages offered in the urban core.
Super Commuting & Its Implications
The relationship between where people live and where they work continues to evolve. A record number continue working from home; however, many employers appear to be shifting back to in-person or hybrid arrangements. This is putting more commuters on roadways and transitways daily – including more super-commuters – and resuming the pre-pandemic trend. Worsening commutes for drivers increase car-related expenses, impact physical health, and amplify the environmental consequences of suburban sprawl. Meanwhile, worsening commutes for transit riders harm quality-of-life in urban cities and disproportionately affect the car-free households that tend to be lower-income. Altogether, this trend may increase tension between workers and employers, as they negotiate working arrangements that affect their commutes.
Housing is of course central to any attempts at cutting back on super-commuting. In cities and suburbs alike, dense construction and infill development (built at a rate that scales appropriately with job growth) can improve housing opportunities so that those who wish to live closer to work can afford to do so.
What’s Your Commute Time?
That’s an interesting study.
I once had a 90-minute commute to get to downtown Chicago via train. I despised that commute with three wasted hours a day.
My commute time now is 0 minutes and has been since 2003.
Palmdale, California has the highest commute percentage at 16.9 percent.
Would you waste 3+ hours a day for the privilege of living in a tax hell hole in the middle of the desert with a commute to Los Angeles, the city with the most ozone pollution in the country?
This got me interested in dirty air statistics.
Please consider an American Lung Association Report on Dirty Cities.
10 Worst Cities
10 Best Cities
If I lived in California, my next commute would be out of the state.
The Hotel California Wealth Tax Advances, You Cannot Leave to Escape It
On January 10, I noted The Hotel California Wealth Tax Advances, You Cannot Leave to Escape It
Without a doubt that’s unconstitutional, but it is not in the least surprising that California would try that.
Twenty Percent of California Lives in Poverty, What’s Going On?
On June 15, I commented Twenty Percent of California Lives in Poverty, What’s Going On?
On a cost-adjusted basis, California leads the nation in percentage living in poverty. Blame the Progressive oligarchs like Governor Newsom.
I suggest voting with your feet.
There’s another type of super commuters that aren’t really being talked about in this article. There are people who travel for construction jobs and come home every two or three weeks on a long weekend. I suppose we could even look at people who emigrate and then mail money back home without actually going home as a type of super commuter, if they are planning on moving back home or at least their original geographic location, eventually.
Covid had my Family pull everything in close to the vest. As a result, 1 job is at home, 2 others are both a 5 minute drive, and the final is all over, but volunteer, so We happily pay for the gas as our very small fee, for the pleasure and experiences we get to receive!
I live in Las Cruces NM….7 minutes to work at 6 am. 11 minutes home….depending on the day. My 3 dogs go with me……where I operate a dental clinic w 9 rooms looking at the landscaped beauty whilst dogs frolic and play in the fountains. Would not trade my daily life for anyone else’s…..but, like you Mish…it took some time in my 20’s to make this kind of living a priority.
I was driving 60 minutes to work and 75 home. 100 miles a day. I relocated for a new job in a rural town and now can walk 1.5 miles to work on nice days. I feel better when I arrive at work and am more productive. Car insurance is greatly reduced because it’s now a pleasure vehicle instead of a commuting vehicle..
Commuting is such a waste of time. I always hated community when I was a worker. It’s easier though to commute these days when people can listen to podcasts or if they are on a train, get actual work done via email, texting, etc..
This will be a strong positive aspect for autonomous cars when they finally get the bugs ironed out.
60 Minutes had a story on super commuters sometime in the past where they featured people who lived in NV (I think) and flew to work in LA. They had a landing strip in front of this home development and parked their plane sin front of their homes.
Four hours a day from the Sacramento-Roseville CA area into almost the SF Bay Area. But generally no more than two times weekly. Sometimes less when circumstances permit (An abundance of meetings). Since the entity for which I work makes a big noise about Climate Change and saving the planet any times hints are dropped about requiring more “face time” I remind them and it goes away for awhile.
Where I live is expensive relative to the rest of the US but fairly cheap when compared to the Bay Area proper! Buying a home there was a complete non-starter.
90 minute train ride to downtown Chicago? Where the heck did you live??? That must include time to drive to the train station. Train ride. Then walk to the office. How long was the actual train ride? I am in near north suburb and could pull off 40 minutes or less on certain times of day (the entire one-way including walking from house, train ride and walking to office). And I could get a lot done on the train.
Lake in the Hills IL (think Crystal Lake Train Station).
Yes I am counting travel to the train.
Checking in from LA. I commute two hours one way by transit to Orange County or drive on average half that. The train is the much better option especially as Im only in office half the week. Benefit of the train commute is that I can read, relax, and occasionally take a 10 minute nap.
Air pollution wise, L.A. is nowhere near as bad as it was in the 1980’s. First Stage smog alerts virtually every day in the summer, back then.
Speaking of taxes, The Democrat packed state Supreme Court unanimously blocked a ballot initiative for November, called the Tax Payer Protection Act. Once again, Democrats have attacked our democracy, when it gets in their way.
Notice how the corporate media takes what is undoubtedly a terrible thing – long, miserable daily commutes and turns it into “super commuting”, as if it is some kind of an achievement for people to be proud of?
Ridiculous
Apartment list is not bragging about this
The fact that one magazine is not bragging about it, means nothing. This is a term that is coined by the capitalist corporate media.
A “misnomer” for sure
35 minutes. And that’s too much imo
Mish is wrong, don’t vote with your feet. Do the rest of the country a favor, stay there and make it better, or live with it. Just don’t ruin it for the rest of us.
Perhaps, but the faster the productive people leave, the sooner the political class will have to make changes, treating their citizens better, starting with lower taxes and fewer laws and regulations. You did say you want people in other poorly D run states or CA specifically to make it better, and leaving eventually does that.
It also has the advantage of educating others who are aware, of the failure of specific CA policies (e.g., the wealth tax, building restrictions and large expenses to just get approval to build, etc.). This results in either the party promoting the disastrous policies of doing a mea culpa (or more likely falsely blaming the other party, but most independent voters see through such lies) and telling their constituents they’ll have to live without those policies (no doubt a huge loss to politicians and their cash donating friends).
Another difference between the productive leaving, and staying there and trying to make it better, is it takes more positive change for the politicians there to recover by making the state a place that doesn’t burden its productive citizens so much compared to other states. Further, it also reduces home prices in the state as people leave (and property tax revenues).
Another reason for super commuting in CA, is the people that are stuck in their homes with low interest rate mortgages, that need a new job but the available ones are far away: thus, moving will result in a huge cost increase in housing expense, unless they significantly downsize.
Government meddling in free markets, creates unnecessary costs to all of us, for the benefit of a few.
I support people making all the world a better place by making the place they are, wherever that is, a better place.
I don’t think the political class will ever have to make changes though. They will just cast a wider net to keep themselves at the top of the heap wherever they are by bringing in money and resources from others who are farther away from the current places which they have so difficult that people finally start leaving.
“The nation’s highest super-commuter rate can be found in Palmdale, a 60-mile drive from Los Angeles, where 16.9 percent of all workers commute at least 90 minutes for work.”
The 14 freeway to Palmdale is clogged every day during rush hour. Used to be, as traffic went up through the mountains, the freeway narrowed down to two lanes. One of my co workers at the time became an editor and moved up there to afford a house.
Commuters get to drive across the San Andreas Fault every day, just south of Palmdale.
Before I got a car my commute was by public transport and walking. Depending on the day and worksite the daily commute varied between 3 and 8 hours. Not fun to work at sites with limited public transport options so for one site I had a 6 mile walk to the bus terminus, followed by a 1 hour bus ride, then another 2 mile walk as the sun was rising. Then pull a 10 hour physically hard job in mid summer or in the depths of winter. Then walk a mile to a bus stop to take 3 buses to get home. Rinse and repeat 6 days/ week. The payoff was to earn a great wage with all the overtime and now I own a car, a house and an apartment. Now how many young people are willing to do a dirty job that consumes 100+ hours for the work and commute? Those that do will get ahead and those that don’t will get to retirement age with nothing.
“so for one site I had a 6 mile walk to the bus terminus, followed by a 1 hour bus ride, then another 2 mile walk as the sun was rising.”
I’m calling BS on this. If the sun was rising on your last 2 mile walk (roughly 6 am) that means you must have caught a 5 am bus (unlikely in a place with limited public transportation) after doing a 6 mile walk (at a brisk pace of 3 miles an hour it means you started walking at 3 am or earlier to get that 5 am bus).
Why not get a ride with a co-worker?
I was scratching my head too trying to fit all those commuting hours in with a full workday, eating, sleeping, and procuring the necessities of life.
Not BS. I left home 4am from Baulkham Hills NSW in Australia, power walked to Parranatta to get the first bus to Warwick Farm around 05.35 am then walked to the Benedict recycling plant at Chipping Norton to start 0700. There was no early bus from Baulkham hills so I had to walk and nobody lived my direction. When your pulling $400 a day then the journey was worth it.
10 to 15 minutes for the 8-10 miles I’ve been commuting the last 30 years. Though some pork from the infrastructure bill is going to replace a freeway bridge that didn’t really need it, and is adding 5 minutes for the next year or so.
I don’t believe those pollution stats..I live one of the top 10 worst and the air quality here is better than where I grew up in Texas in Houston and Dallas without a doubt. Of the states I lived in, I felt the sickest in Texas. There’s no way there’s not at 2 or 3 cities in Texas given the sheer amount of growth they’ve experienced.
My commute on most days is a trip down the stairs to the office. When I do go in, the office is less than a mile from home.
My commutes in Texas and New England were about 35 minutes each way sitting in traffic. What a huge waste of time.
Overall air pollution has decreased a lot in America. So if you grew up in the 80’s things were a lot worse then than they are now even in the worst cities today. Unleaded gas and catalytic converters have done miracles.
The west coast cities always look bad because the mountains trap the air in the coastal valleys where everyone lives. It’s always going to be like that.
Incidentally I lived in Dallas and Austin from the mid 90s through the mid 2000s (roughly 9 years). Air quality there was fine and no different from Toronto where I came from. What was different was that pollen and allergies were VASTLY higher in Texas than Canada (I’m lucky I’m not allergic to anything) so perhaps the bad air you remember was more pollen related than human pollution.
“I don’t believe those pollution stats..”
Any “air pollution” “stat” not distinguishing between Pacific Coastal San Francisco and downtown San Jose and the East Bay, is just plain pointless.
Even in LA; the immediate coastal area is much less “polluted”; though also much colder and foggier, than even a bit inland.
San Francisco is nearly always windy: Cool (more like cold, for those used to SoCal…), fresh air drawn across the peninsula/city from the Pacific by higher temps across the bay. Even at night, the sheer buttcoldness of the ocean there, prevents much if any reverse flow. Where the heck would the pollution there come from, aside from perhaps some very local body odor of homeless people lacking access to shower facilities?
Anchorage Alaska is on the list? So what that tells me is being dirty, is actually mostly clean, and these values are trace factors that are negligible.
Before I retired, my commutes ranged from a half hour to an hour and a quarter. I worked from 1979 through 2002, and exclusively used mass transit beginning in 1985.
Retired long-haul trucker. Drove the ’48’ and Canada. Retired in Jun2006. My commute was the tractor’s sleeper to the driver’s seat and back. 🔦✝️
0 minutes on days I work from home (3x a week on average) and 15-20 minutes when I go into the office (2x a week on average).
3 miles. 6 minutes tops. No stop signs and only 1 traffic light on my commute. 2.5 miles of it is highway miles. I know it’s rough on the car, but oh well.
I’ve always lived close to work. When I worked in downtown Oakland in my younger days, I chose a place where I could bike to work even though it was a rough area at the time (Lake Merritt). A coworker was commuting 1+ hours from Tracy. Not for me.
3.2 miles each way to the radio station, about 8 minutes each direction, Medford, Oregon. BTW, those American Lung Association numbers are a bit deceptive. They’re including summer wildfire smoke due to Gang Green’s worship of not harvesting but rather burning the public lands.. It’s not car and truck pollution…it’s the false god of “Restoring the Forest”, or more accurately, Northern Oregon Progs desire to “great reset” us, de-industrialize and de-populate our rural lands and push us into 15 minute “Climate Friendly Equitable Communities”. No, we’re not going willingly or quietly.
Makes sense regarding wildfires contributing. It would be interesting to see what the baseline pollution is without wildfires.
Wrt air quality, Wildfires matter. A lot. Without them, Chiang Mai; heck even Fairbanks; could just about be nice enough places to live.
In general, busybodies vastly over estimate the importance of contributions to the world, made by their own particular, ultimately rather insignificant, self and species.
If you want the cleanest air; windward coasts in less sunny (UV and ocean air leads to rather high Ozone) climes, is where it is at. Or perhaps very high mountains.
My guess is that the “great reset” will go about as well as all the other progressive initiatives have gone, i.e. utter failure. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop them from trying. Just look at CA for an example of how far they will push it. It’s a mania, they will push it to the point of failing states and beyond.
Was wondering about that – Medford area not very populated.
Indianapolis not large, but in a natural bowl, gets fogged in at night a lot.
Before retirement it was 35 minutes and 28 miles each way.
When I was in middle and high school it was an hour on the school bus each way, That sucked.
20-22 minutes, 8.5 miles… each way.
the real upside for this commute is 3 different groceries (discount/middle/up-scale) & 3 different fuel+convenience stores en route… huge time & cost saver.
Round trip 135 minutes if things go perfectly, on average 160 minutes, up to 4 hours in summer or when the ferry breaks down or some bureaucrat does a boo-boo. Washington State Ferries system crippled by mandatory Covid vaccine, expensive foreign-built electric ferries, no apprentice programs and work start on the extra board, and increasing upkeep on an aging fleet.
mandatory Covid Death Shots
15 minutes 6 miles each way.
0 minutes, fully remote.
Same here since MAR 2020. Before that is was 25 minutes each way with views of the Gulf of Mexico along the way.
February 2020 for me, but that was only because I was ill prior to the shut down. Had a nasty cold (probably COVID) in mid/late February 2020. At the time I was already remote 3 days a week so the boss insisted that I stay at home and work until I was no longer hacking and coughing. COVID and the lockdowns officialy hit two weeks later.
Prior to going fully remote, my 2 days per week commute was about 45 minutes one way.
I’m retired from IT job where I averaged 45 minutes each way. Now I still maintain and purchase rentals (yes, I’m one of those evil landlords). Selling a home far from my current house (70 minutes) and hoping to pick up a dump w/in 20 to 30 minutes (and turn it into something nice). Working for yourself means you pick the days you travel. Probably 4 days/week during major renovation … then as needed after that (averaging 1 to 2 days/week)
There was a point in Los Angeles, 70 miles each way. Lived in the IE and worked in the South Bay. Now, in Huntsville, 12 minutes if I make all the lights. Some people that live close to the Arsenal or Research Park can have 5 minute commutes, owning a home. Or drive 30 minutes and have acres.
75 minutes one way normally, but I live rural so open country roads. I also work super part time, so commuting doesn’t take up a ton of my life.