To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net
Friday, October 17, 2014
A Majority of Americans Are (Technically) Multi-Modal
New data show a clear mobility "continuum" from car-only to car-less.
As we saw firsthand during our nine-month Future of Transportation series,
U.S. cities are working toward more balanced mobility systems that
offer a range of reliable trip options. But just how many Americans take
advantage of these options on a regular basis? It's a tough question to
answer with much precision, but it just got a lot easier with a new
study from Virginia Tech scholars Ralph Buehler and Andrea Hamre—one of
the first of its kind based on a representative national population.
The short answer: most of them. The longer short answer: some of them, but far from all. We'll start with the conclusion (via Transportation) then work back through the details:
Only 28 percent of Americans solely rely on a car during a week. The
majority of Americans are multimodal car users who drive and make at
least one weekly trip by foot, bicycle, or public transportation.
Stricter definitions for multimodal driving additionally show that about
one in four American car users make at least 7 trips by walking,
cycling, or public transportation during the week.
Buehler (who contributed
to our Future series) and Hamre based their findings on an analysis of
data from the 2001 and 2009 National Household Travel Surveys, which
combine single-day trip diaries and broader travel questionnaires to
track mobility trends of hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents. Let's
start at the daily level (which we chart below). More than
three-quarters of NHTS respondents relied on a car alone for their
single-day travel needs, though this share of "mono-modal" driving fell
slightly over time, while the (very modest) share of car-less daily
travelers rose. (CityLab)So on any given day, a lot of Americans only drive—something we already know quite well from commute trends.
But the weekly habits reveal a more complex picture of mobility
behavior. Here we see that the share of Americans who rely only on a car
for the entire week is in the clear minority, under 30 percent in both
years, with those shares also declining over time. Car-less travelers
rise again over time. And multi-modal drivers, who use a car plus at
least one other mode during the week, make up nearly 65 percent of all
respondents in both years. Again, we chart the findings from Buehler and
Hamre: (CityLab)What
this means is that a lot of people who only drove a car on the day they
filled out their trip diary also indicated in other questions that they
used an alternative mode at some point during the week—roughly 63
percent of one-day drivers in 2001 and 64 percent in 2009, to be more
specific (not shown above). The reverse behavior also holds true, though
to a much lesser degree. Of the survey respondents who didn't use a car
at all during their diary day, about 10 percent in 2001 and 11 percent
in 2009 did drive at some point during the week.
The thing is, not all multi-modal travelers are created equal. Some
people use whatever mode is the best option for a particular trip.
Others may be more accidentally multi-modal—maybe they'd prefer to use
the car but a spouse is stuck in traffic when they have to leave the
house. The difference is best captured by how many non-car trips a
person makes a week; it's fair to say that the more often someone takes
an alternative mode, the more multi-modal that person is.
So Buehler and Hamre established four thresholds to distinguish
different levels of multi-modality: one, three, five, and seven non-car
rides a week, in addition to some driving. Let's take the 64.9 percent
of respondents who met the minimal multi-modal threshold of one non-car
trip in 2009. As expected, the numbers decrease as the thresholds rise,
but they remain impressive. About 48 percent of respondents took at
least three non-car trips in a week, and about 33 percent took at least
five. When the multi-modal threshold reaches seven non-car trips a
week—an average of one a day—nearly a quarter of all respondents still
met the mark.
The 2001 figures are similar. We chart both years below: (CityLab)So
that's technically a multi-modal majority for America, but it's also
nowhere near a simple one, and by the strictest measures it's only a
rising minority. Buehler and Hamre see this as a "continuum of mobility
types," with car-only living on one end and car-free on the other, and
most Americans stuck somewhere in the middle. What's also pretty clear,
if far from overwhelming, is which direction the movement along this
spectrum is heading.