The state of the super commute
Northern California pre-pandemic and now
Living in the Bay Area, super commuters are all around you: you meet nurses flying into work from out of state, talk with rideshare drivers on their way back home to the Central Valley, and watch friends and coworkers move out of the city to find an affordable place and commute back in. Everywhere you turn, someone is arriving from a multi-stage, hour-plus commute.
For the 15 years before 2020, commute times had been rising for Northern Californians, in sync with the region’s economic booms — the roads and rails of Northern California have become synonymous with the “super commute” — a relatively new phenomenon and concept defined as a one-way commute to work of more than 90 minutes.
High wages in a super-charged Bay Area economy attracted talent from far out (and pushed lower earners out further) into the broader Northern California “megaregion” and beyond. In 2021, San Joaquin County, home of Stockton, had the highest rate of super commuting in the nation — nearly 12% — far above the then-national average of 3%.
And this disconnect between housing and jobs had (and continues to have) myriad effects on our health and the health of our climate. Particularly in their current, car-dominated form, long commutes are linked with higher levels of stress, obesity, less sleep, and less time with family and friends; the planetary costs of travel by car are well-documented.
Addressing super commuting has benefits for public and planetary health, and ought to have been a major priority for leaders throughout Northern California. Yet, as the problem worsened, little action seemed to be brewing. And then came the pandemic.
For a brief window at the start of lockdown, commutes ground nearly to a halt and road traffic virtually disappeared. Many super commuters switched over to remote work and years later, new traffic patterns have emerged. For now, work from home policies have softened but seem to be holding on, cars are making a comeback, but public transit ridership remains down).
Nearly four years out from shelter-in-place, what is the state of super commuting today?
As of 2022, super commuting rates were down relative to 2019 levels in almost all Northern California counties. Inbound and outbound super commuting decreased in all nine of the Bay Area counties (Alameda, San Francisco, Marin, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Contra Costa, Napa, Sonoma, Solano).
This decrease wasn’t universally shared across the region, however, with some of the further-out counties seeing increases (Yolo, Yuba) and others like Stanislaus County and San Joaquin County only experiencing nominal drops.
Coupled with population growth (see below) in some of the same more distant areas, this indicates a potential further wave of displacement from the region’s larger metropolitan areas (San Jose, San Francisco, and Sacramento) and raises questions about how the economy of the Bay Area counties will adapt with reduced nighttime and daytime population figures.
It’s worth noting that, though super commuting declined for people living in the nine Bay Area counties, population declined more in most of them, indicating that there is still a high saturation of people with long commutes. I also ran analyses to look for relationships between changes in commuting and changes in income, housing costs relative to income, and the change in population but didn’t find much of significance. Better data (the ACS 1-year data has missing data for a number of the counties I studied) would allow for further tests on more variables to find more of the story behind changes in commuting patterns.
Overall, though super commuting has declined slightly in the Northern California region overall, it remains a persistent problem. Before turning to potential solutions to the challenge of super commuting, let’s take a moment to understand — who are the super commuters? Most super commuters are drivers, but as of 2021 public transportation riders were over three times more likely than drivers to be super commuters. Historically, super commuters have been disproportionately higher income, but evidence from the past two years indicates that may be changing as higher earners take fuller advantage of remote work options that are unavailable to lower earners.
According to the San Jose-based Mercury News, in 2021 “white workers worked from home at nearly 2.5 times the rate as Hispanic workers,” who tend to be younger “[and those] with a Master’s degree worked from home at 4.5 times the rate” of high school grads; both groups are over-represented in service industry jobs. The Mercury News report also notes that of all racial groups in the Bay Area, Black workers had the longest commutes, and the Bay Area Equity Atlas cites Native American men as the demographic with the highest rate of super commutes.
Much is still up in the air in the wake of the pandemic, though, and despite preliminary evidence it remains to be seen how the interaction between remote work and commuting patterns will shake out in the wake of the pandemic — and thus how the face super commuting may change.
As more ACS 5-year surveys are released over the next decade, we can use the higher quality data to paint a clearer picture. Zooming in on the census’ Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs) in certain counties could yield further insight into the backgrounds and homes of long-haul commuters. In an ideal (but unlikely) scenario, access to confidential census microdata would allow fine-grained analysis of commuting patterns and a detailed understanding of who super commuters are. While all this would improve the depth of recommendations let’s look at what can we do about super commuting right now.
We can have nice things — like trains
The first key policy to pursue is an expansion of quality public transportation service.
Expanding and improving rail service, as Amtrak and Caltrain plan to do, could shave commute times for train riders and encourage people to forgo their car — which would help not only the people who get out of the cars but also those who have to remain in cars and on the roads.
The population growth of the Central Valley counties gives more reason to be excited about the recently-announced $3 billion federal investment in the California high-speed rail project that would connect the Bay Area and the Central Valley (Sacramento, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, and Merced counties) and beyond to LA. As these counties grow, providing better, faster connection throughout the region will facilitate economic development. Relevant interregional rail travel, let alone high-speed rail, has been a distant dream in the States for a long time. Hopefully we’re getting closer to making it a reality.
Additionally, most of the nation’s public transportation commuters are bus riders, and prioritizing improvements in service and speeds for the bus, as well as subway and light rail (especially if timed to facilitate seamless last-mile connections from regional transit hubs) could provide shared benefits for short and long commuters alike. New transit could become quickly self-sustaining, assuming planners follow the lessons from Los Angeles and mirror logical, currently-existing commuting patterns rather than attempting to create them out of thin air. (The benefits from these changes will only become significant to continuing drivers if adopted en masse, though.)
An upcoming regional transit measure could provide funding for this work in the Bay Area, which, though it has seen declines, is still an end point for many commuters. Given the pandemic-exacerbated decline in quality and popularity of BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) over the past few years, the region’s hybrid subway and commuter rail system, it remains unclear if voters will vote to support transit. Congestion pricing in San Francisco, currently on pause, could help if the generated revenue is efficiently allocated to improve transit; if not, congestion pricing could lead to worse outcomes for lower earners in the city.
We can’t rely on transit improvements alone to address super commuting, however. Super commuting, at its root, is about a poor alignment between jobs and housing — if jobs are close to workplaces, commute times are lower. So long as the region’s jobs remain concentrated in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area and housing development at all levels fails to keep pace, some people will have long commutes. If we only improve transit access without creating a more appropriate spread and concentration of housing, we make long commuting more possible (with all of its attendant health concerns).
As California’s Department of Housing and Community Development department pushes forward with more aggressive action to increase housing supply throughout the state, the Bay Area is under intense scrutiny and San Francisco in particular looks like it will have to speed up the construction of new housing. Without significant new funding for affordable housing, though, the impacts of expedited construction will be much more ambiguous for lower earners.
By addressing super commuting through transit and housing investments, the Bay Area and the broader Northern California region can make gains in residential wellbeing and happiness, increase economic productivity, and reach emission-reduction targets. Let’s hope our lawmakers are up to the task.
Housekeeping & misc.
- You can access my code (data cleaning and analysis in R) and find notes on my QGIS map-making on Github https://github.com/pestes24/URPL1620_final_assignment_
- Census questions about commuting (in case you’re curious): https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-question/commuting/
- NYU’s own Mitchell Moss on the vanguard of studying super commuting: Super Commuting Is on the Rise, Thanks to Flexibility of Hybrid Work.
