Super commuters have declined as the recent proliferation of remote and hybrid jobs has reversed this trend, Apartment List’s economist Chris Salviati writes.
Today there are 1.5 million fewer super commuters than in 2019, and the metros with the largest concentrations of remote work have seen the largest improvements in commute times.
As of 2021 – the most recent data currently available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey – the number of super commuters had fallen back to 3.1 million, 4 percent fewer than there were in 2010. In 2019, super commuters comprised 3 percent of the American workforce, but as of 2021, that figure has fallen by one-third to 2 percent.
Highlights of the report:
- After increasing from 3.2 million in 2010 to 4.6 million in 2019, the number of “super commuters” who travel 90 minutes or more each way to work has fallen back to 3.1 million as of 2021, driven by the widespread adoption of remote work. 2 percent of the U.S. workforce are super commuters, down from 3 percent in 2019.
- Despite the improvements, there remain significant populations of super commuters in and around the nation’s most expensive markets, especially the San Francisco Bay Area and the region surrounding New York City. Stockton, CA – on the outskirts of the Bay Area – has the nation’s highest super commuting rate at 7.4 percent.
- Super commuting has historically been most common among high earners, but that gap is closing. The super commuting rate for six-figure earners fell from 4.4 percent in 2019 to 2.2 percent in 2021, while the rate for workers earning less than $25K fell from 2.1 percent to 1.7 percent.
- Workers who rely on public transit to get to work are more than three times as likely to be super commuters as those who commute by car; 6.8 percent of all transit riders were super commuters in 2021, compared to 2.1 percent of drivers.
Housing affordability still driving super commuters
The report concludes that, the rise of remote work has led to a corresponding drop off in commuting. And no commute category has dropped off faster than lengthy super commutes of 90 minutes or more.
“From 2019 to 2021, the number of super commuters in the U.S. fell by 1.5 million, erasing a full decade of expansion during which the super commuter population was growing at triple the rate of the overall workforce.
“But even as the burden of super commuting has been somewhat ameliorated, the underlying cause of the trend has not. Acute housing affordability crises are still driving workers away from the nation’s most expensive cities, but more of them are now working remotely rather than bearing arduous commutes to downtown offices.
In fact, remote work has the potential to accelerate migration to the far-flung exurbs of large metros.
Top 20 Metros With Highest Rate Of Super Commuters
Read the full report from Apartment List here.
