Owning or renting a home near a transit station may not have much impact on whether a person commutes via their car or some form of non-car transportation, but closer proximity of their work location to a transit station increases the likelihood that they won’t be driving their own car to work. Those are the findings of a recent study from researchers at the University of Denver, as reported in this CityLab article from Eric Jaffe.
In an ideal transit city, where commuting by bus or rail is as convenient as taking a car, the trip between station and home or office is a quick one. But in the typical city, where transit-oriented development remains a work in progress, one end of the commute might be much more accessible than the other. So which is more likely to get commuters out of their cars: living near a stop, or working near one?
A trio of researchers at the University of Denver recently tried to answer that question for the Mile High metro – an area that’s made a big push in recent years to expand both transit service and transit-oriented development. They analyzed the 2009-2010 commute patterns of 3,400 employed locals who either lived, worked, or lived and worked near three of the region’s light rail lines. “Near” in this case meant being within a mile, half-mile, or 15-minute walk of a station.
As expected, people who both lived and worked near a light rail station had the highest transit commute shares. More surprisingly, commuters who worked near light rail had much stronger transit commute habits than those who lived near it. Those with offices within a mile of transit had a 26 percent transit commute share; those with homes, meanwhile, had a mere 11 percent – lower than the overall regional average. At the half-mile mark, those shares rose to 31 percent for office proximity and 18 percent for home proximity. At the 15-minute threshold they hit 37 and 26 percent, respectively.
In other words, far more commuters made the trip to work without a car when their office was near transit than when their home was near it – regardless how the researchers defined “near.”
