GETTING TO WORK IN VIRGINIA 2000: DRIVING ALONE IS UP, CARPOOLING IS DOWN

How do Virginians get to work at the beginning of the 21st century? Pretty much as they have since the middle of the last one—in a car. Or a truck. Or a van. In other words, in a personal-sized vehicle powered by a gasoline engine.

In 2000, 93 percent of all Virginians who worked outside their own homes got to work this way, and the vast majority of these drove alone. In fact, the 80 percent of Virginians who did so is a gain of four percentage points over the 76 percent who drove alone in 1990. And carpooling is down—from 1990’s 60 percent to 2000’s 13 percent.

Which leaves only 7 percent who used some other means of getting to work—4 percent who took public transportation, 2 percent who walked, and 1 percent who used bicycles or some other means to get to their jobs. Even in metro areas, where public transportation is presumably more available than in rural areas, usage is extremely low, ranging from a "high" of nearly 8 percent in the Northern Virginia portion of the Washington DC MSA down to 0.3 percent in the Virginia portion of the Bristol MSA.

Meanwhile, it’s college and university localities that win hands-down when it comes to walking to work—9 percent in Prince Edward County (Longwood and Hampden Sydney), 17 percent in Charlottesville (UVa), 10 percent in Harrisonburg (JMU), 13 percent in Radford (Radford University), 16 percent in Williamsburg (William & Mary), and a whopping 28 percent in Lexington (VMI and Washington & Lee). However, as the virtually universal parking problems on Virginia’s campuses will testify, it’s probably not faculty and staff who are coming to work on foot but students with part-time jobs who live on campus or nearby.

In 2000, Virginians who worked outside their homes spent an average of 54 minutes a day commuting to their jobs. Residents of the Northern Virginia metro area spent the most time at this—over half an hour each way, but it was nonmetro residents who spend the second-highest amount of time commuting. And regardless of where a commuter lives, the trip is longer now, with the average working-outside-the-home Virginian spending 7 more minutes per day commuting than he or she did in 1990. (see metro/nonmetro comparisons)

The most time-consuming trips to work are in northern Virginia, central Virginia, and the Northern Neck. Although we don’t yet know where people from these areas are going, we do know that it’s not just distance that makes these commutes long ones. In central Virginia—in the counties around the Charlottesville and Richmond metro areas—distance probably does play a large part, as people commute from the counties bordering the MSAs and the more rural parts of the MSAs to the more heavily urbanized areas. In northern Virginia, it’s also just the number of people on the road, inflating trips of relatively few miles to half an hour or more.

Contact: Julia Martin, jhm3c@virginia.edu, 434.982.5581 or 434.977.6025