The How of Transportation
In the everyday routines of our lives, we often overlook the significance of the ordinary, basic things that get the gears of our day moving. One of these is transportation. Most likely, when you think of getting to a destination, your thought isn’t about how you will get there, but more so when. In the United States, we tend to pay little notice to this given, somewhat invisible, yet vital foundation of transportation that kicks our lives into motion. Undeniably, cars are the steady normal, with a supposed 72% of people in the United States using a car as their primary means of transportation for commuting. Yet what about the several other ways of getting from A to Z, like biking, the subway, the bus, or even walking?
My goal is to shine light onto the importance in the how of transportation. In my last study, I established a positive relationship between using a car as a primary commuting mode of transportation and mental health distress, and determined that there are indeed health related implications that are affected by car usage. Here, I aim to dig further into this phenomena, considering not just the transportation mode of cars, yet the other hows of transportation. Specifically, how other modes of transportation may play out over time, how they respond regionally, and how they may individually interact with health.
As previously done in my last project, I’ve used the U.S. American Community Survey census data, primarily from 2022, paired with 2022 U.S. health rankings and data to uncover the juicy details related to the topic of transportation.
Firstly, I sought to gain an understanding of how all the different modes of transportation are changing overtime.
To clarify, the specific modes of transportation I am looking are by car, bus, subway/elevated rails, long distance train or commuter rails, motorcycle, bicycle, and walking. For reference (just because I was unsure myself), a subway or elevated rail it typically something a bit more secluded to the city, while a commuter rail is reserved for longer distances that can traverse over a county.
These timelines take place from 2009 to 2022. I had to isolate car, truck, and van usage due to its high average of 87% before 2020, meaning that around 87% of commuting means for transportation in the U.S. were by car over the last decade and a half . Though there does not appear to be much change before 2020, I couldn’t help but notice the slight but visible decrease in car usage, by 2017, reaching 86%. While I wanted to get to the bottom of this, I was unfortunately not able to pin anything specific that would cause this. Regardless, there are still several combined factors that could have contributed to this slight decline (before 2020). For instance, since 2010, the number of remote workers has increased by 400%, and was increasing even before the pandemic. An increase in telecommuters overtime yields lower commuting transportation proportions as they are home and have no need to commute. Additionally, it has been noted that since 2014, the typical price of a car increased tremendously at a much quicker rate than inflation with inflation, likely causing more of a downward trend in car dominancy. With higher prices brings a smaller desire towards buying a personal vehicle, which in turn may push people towards much cheaper modes of transportation, especially public transit.
Additionally, we cannot forget the influx of sustainability overtime in our communities, which has prompted greater public infrastructure and urban planning initiatives that provide more room for biking lanes and public transit. If we take a look at the timeline with the multiple modes of transportation, the usage of bikes takes a little leap around 2012. According to the U.S. census, 2012 yielded a 9% growth in biking commuters, reflecting a more sustainable growing future in mind. Though a little confusingly, just like the means of transportation for cars, its temporal trend appears to have the slightest decrease in proportion (before 2020), a similar pattern that can be observed with walking, motorcycling, and busses as well. This slight decrease across several modes of transportation could also be attributed to the ever-growing population of those working at home.
All the while though, the proportion of transportation of subways and elevated rails have appeared to increase at the steadiest rate overtime, which would coincide with society’s growing appeal to sustainability. Interestingly, “Long-distance train or commuter rail” was not included in the ACS until 2019, despite it already having a presence in transport way before. I would argue though that the addition of another mode of public transportation also continues to supply the narrative that the ideals of sustainability are growing in our culture, through more modes of transportation being documented.
As visible in both graphs, the pandemic around 2020 served a hard hit to all modes of transportation. The average proportion of car usage for commute dropped nearly 10%, along with other all time lows for the all other modes of transportation. It appears that busses had one of the most drastic drops with the pandemic, and is having a disproportionately long recovery, jumping back up at a much slower rate than its counterparts. Considering how busses are indeed one of the most crowded options, and are mainly composed of sitting (side by side next to other people), fear may be lingering longer and hampering this rebound for bus transportation as a result.
After all this pondering about the distribution of different modes of transportation, I couldn’t help but wonder how this would translate into different regions of the states.
As visible here yet also in the time chart above, walking appears to be the most popular mode of transportation other than by car. Following in second place would be bus public transit, then bicycling, then subway or elevated rail, and lastly long-distance trains or commuter rails. Most distinctly, the West seems to take the cake when it comes to proportions of those who walk and bike as their means of commute, while the Northeast boasts greater proportions of buses, subway or elevated rails, and long distance train/commuter rails. The fact that the top 3 most bike-friendly cities in the United States are from the west, specifically, Portland OR, San Francisco CA, and San Jose CA, continues to reflect that they are the best in the domains of walking and bicycling transportation. Additionally, the Northeast of the U.S. undoubtedly dominates the transportation proportions of buses, subway, and commuter rails, as 6 out of 10 of the cities rated for the best public transportation are of the Northeast, New York city taking the first place throne.
While not really great compared to its west and northeast counterparts, the midwest still does have a few good points of public transportation, Chicago, IL being ranked in 8th in public transit in the United States. As for the South, however, their public transportation, with the smallest proportions of all transportation methods other than cars, leaves much to be desired. In fact, 7 out of 15 of the cities with the worst public transit systems are in the south. Undoubtedly, this very much has to do with the geography of the south that is more rural and spread out, leaving little room for walkability and forcing a dependency on cars. Additionally, ideology can plays a role into the subpar transportation here. With the south being typically more conservative, some southern politicians view transit as a waste of spending that their voters will not use or care to use. With more conservative values comes more values of individualism, which are echoed by the pinnacle of having one’s own car, and people able to drive it wherever and whenever. At some point, public transit becomes more like social welfare in some people’s eyes, being typically governmentally instituted, which many conservatives do not feel inclined towards.
In light of this all, I wanted to continue my focus on health in reminiscence of my last project, and understand how it interacts with transportation, specially by state regions.
Here, we can see that with a higher proportion of cars, trucks, and vans used as commuting transportation, frequent mental health distress increases. Alongside this, life expectancy also declines with an increase in the proportion of car transportation. Fascinatingly, the Northeast and the West have smaller proportions of car usage, and seem to both exhibit lower values of frequent mental distress and higher life expectancy. Most certainly, this could argue the importance of sustainability, public transportation, and walkability in our cities, as their increased prevalence can positively influence health. Moreover, it’s not surprising that the midwest and southern states have an increased proportion of car-based transportation, and therefore a decrease in health, especially the south. I believe this could be a reflection of their lack of public transit, walkability, and possibilities for other sustainable methods of transportation.
The state here that appears like a bit of an outlier on the frequent mental stress axis is that of West Virginia, which indeed has a higher proportion of cars used as transportation than the west or northeast. While trying to discover the reasoning as to why West Virginia poses as the most stressed-out state, I realized there was not much of the why being explained in articles that capitalized on this same phenomena. So, I diverted over to Reddit, and got the inside scoop by reading a post where a local asks in the r/WestVirginia subreddit in lieu of census findings, “What are your thoughts on the future of WV?”. While key issues are related to a decrease in jobs, a population decrease, on of the most commonly mentioned is the state government’s clinging to older values. Historically, West Virginia is a coal town, and holds dear to tradition. Yet, this lack of change is what locals believe is stunting them as a state, several users urging that different kinds of energy (other than coal) be used and better street and urban infrastructure be implemented, West Virginia road infrastructure being ranked as the third worst in the U.S. in 2021. This very commentary indeed coincides the idea that the implementation of sustainability, which can yield better infrastructure and more public transit, might play a decent role in the realms of health.
To top it all off, I will end with this: the trends between unique modes of transportation and life expectancy.
While not all of these relationships were of the strongest correlations possible, I felt it was quite significant how every mode of transportation other than car-based transportation had a positive relationship with life expectancy, while life expectancy clearly decreases when counties are more car dominant. Generally, counties that have more instances of public transportation, or better access to bike lanes and sidewalks, are more sustainable. This then yields increased health benefits, a phenomena reputed even by the CDC, with larger presences of public transport contributing to less air pollution, motor vehicle crashes, and more physical inactivity resulting from cities that use transit best. Considering this, we can likely establish that it is not just coincidence that every mode of transportation yields a positive relationship between life expectancy in some way, whether small or large.
It has been enlightening experience bringing attention to the how of transportation. I am curious to see the ways in which we will grow in our prevalence of different transportation methods overtime, even in the south. Hopefully the United States will continue to recover from the blow to transportation during the pandemic, and resume the necessary journey that pursues sustainable transportation methods for our future.
