In 2021, how people moved around cities, especially when going to work, changed a lot because of telecommuting, economic shifts, and the response to COVID-19. Researchers at the Accessibility Observatory at the University of Minnesota found this in their new study. We already knew that these changes reduced traffic jams and made fewer people use public transit, but the new data shows deeper impacts for three types of transportation: cars, buses and trains, and bicycles.
The most interesting discovery in the car data was that during the busiest morning hours, the barriers to getting to job opportunities, mainly because of traffic jams, almost disappeared. To measure how easy it is to reach job opportunities, the researchers looked at how many jobs a typical worker could reach within 30 minutes, on average, when using a car, bus, train, or bicycle.
Access to jobs
In the 50 largest American cities, people who drove to work in the morning had much better access to jobs in 2021. For example, compared to how things were before the pandemic in January 2020, workers in the Atlanta region could get to 82% more jobs in 2021, those in the Seattle area could reach 62% more jobs, Houston workers had 50% more job options, and Minneapolis saw a 42% increase.
“These are big changes in the number of job opportunities you can reach by car, and we didn’t need to build new roads or change the way we use land to make this happen,” the authors explain. “Underneath these better job access numbers is a decrease in the number of people driving alone during rush hours. This trend has eased, but it’s still there. If we can take advantage of this and offer other good ways of getting to work, we might be able to reduce traffic without building more highways.”
The improvement in job access by car was most significant in cities that used to have the worst traffic. In 2021, morning commuters in Los Angeles and San Francisco could reach more than twice as many job opportunities within the same amount of time as they could before the pandemic in January.
Public transport
Even though there have been reports about fewer people using buses and trains all over the country, the study found that the number of job opportunities people could get to by using public transit didn’t change much in the busiest metro areas, even with problems like not enough workers, restrictions on how many people could ride because of health issues, and economic uncertainty.
“Federal grants for operations early in the pandemic helped maintain access to jobs for essential workers, who needed transit most,” the authors say. “The challenge now for transit agencies is to continue to maintain the level of accessibility they have been providing.”
The most recent findings show how changes in how we travel can significantly improve our ability to reach job opportunities. These new insights are the first of their kind on a national scale, and they help us understand how the shifts in daily travel caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have altered the way we access different job options. The early phase of the pandemic offered a unique chance to study how people’s choices and what they can reach played out in cities across the United States.
