Pre-outbreak, Austin’s commute times kept growing in 2019

It should be no surprise that the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that commute times in the Austin metro area got longer.

The Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey revealed that in the five county Austin-Round Rock metropolitan statistical area — Bastrop, Caldwell, Hays, Travis and Williamson counties — the average time spent getting to work for the area’s nearly 1.2 million commuters increased 41.5 seconds in 2019 to an average of 27 minutes and 42 seconds. For the average commuter, that amounts to three more hours spent in the car each year.

While a pre-pandemic increase in commute times seems predictable, the Census Bureau’s latest survey has some informative nuggets that its analysts considered statistically significant.

For instance, the share of commuters who drove to work alone in Travis County — considered by many transportation experts as the leading cause of increased traffic — actually dropped from 75.3% to 72.4%. Conversely, the share of people who worked from home and those carpooling increased, something that should lead to fewer cars on the road, and therefore, a shorter commute for everyone.

Yet the average Travis County commuter’s trip time got longer. That was also felt across the five-county Austin-Round Rock metro area, according to the data.

Romic Aevaz, a policy analyst with Eno Center for Transportation, said the data likely show what population growth on the outskirts of Austin and in its suburbs is doing to commuting times. Additionally, Aevaz said, it is a symptom of the ever-increasing costs of living in the city’s core that are forcing more and more farther away from the city’s center. In August, the median selling price for homes within Austin’s city limits was $435,000, according to the Austin Board of Realtors.

“Due to people living further and further away from the city, even though the amount of people commuting is going down, their commute times are going up,” Aevaz said.

All told, the average Austin-area commuter spent 120 hours, 29 minutes and 36 seconds just getting to work in 2019. That amounts to listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” 791 times, watching “Avengers: Endgame” nearly 40 times — or how long Tesla CEO Elon Musk has claimed to work in a single week. Those commuting times also do not take into account time spent going from work to home. The census survey does not track how long commutes are from work to home.

Some of that data falls within the margins of error in the annual 1-year American Community Survey conducted by the Census Bureau. However, more reliable data from 2018 still showed that the average Austin metro area resident’s commute to work has grown more than 2 minutes since 2010, when the average was about 25 minutes and 18 seconds

Other Texans have it worse

Another somewhat surprising finding— given Austinites’ love of hating local traffic that’s spawned a least one parody social media account — is that the average commute to work of an Austin metro resident is not the slowest in the state.

That honor belongs to the Houston metro area, whose 3.1 million daily commuters averaged 30 minutes and 41 seconds heading to work each day. Second place gripes can be awarded to the commuters of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, who spent an average of 28 minutes and 2 seconds traveling to work in 2019.

El Paso had the shortest commutes among major Texas metropolitan areas, but the census numbers do not factor in the thousands of workers from across the border in Juarez who travel to the Texas city every day.

The strongest correlation for average commute time in a metro area appears to be the number of people traveling to work each day from outside of an urban center, representing a longer trip and more time on behind the wheel, on a bus or train.

According to the census numbers, the share of commuters in the San Antonio area living outside of Bexar County, for instance, is relatively low at just shy of 20% of the commuting workforce. American commuters in the El Paso metro area living outside El Paso County are nearly nonexistent at less than 1% of the total.

Meanwhile, more than 30% of commuters in the Houston area live outside of Harris County. And in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, nearly 40% of commuters live outside Dallas and Tarrant counties.

In the Austin area, 39% of commuters live outside of Travis County.

Outbreak impact

To be sure, things have changed quite dramatically since the coronavirus pandemic took hold in Austin.

For Jenne Barbour, a senior marketing manager at Austin technology company SolarWinds, her roughly 20-minute commute to work has now dropped to 15 seconds. Like many across the city, Barbour is working from home.

“I haven't worn a shoe with a heel in more than six months, and that has to be some sort of achievement,” Barbour said.

The shift for many white-collar workers from the office to working from home has had a marked effect on traffic in Austin. Jen Duthie, a managing engineer for Austin’s Transportation Department, said Austin’s roads are seeing roughly 20% fewer cars on the road in 2020 compared with 2019.

Traffic volumes dropped off precipitously as the city went into lockdown mode in March. Since then, the numbers have started to creep back up.

“This pandemic has been pretty amazing experiment in what happens when a lot of people remote work or, unfortunately, are not working in this case,” Duthie said.

Aevaz, the transportation policy analyst, said he expects the pandemic to have lasting effects on how long it will take people to get to work. He said numbers should continue to creep up, but they likely will not reach pre-pandemic levels any time soon as people and companies adapt to working from home and consider making the change permanent.

“I don’t think we will end up on either side of the extreme,” Aevaz said. “I think we will end up somewhere in the middle. I think there is an appetite for the hybrid model.”

The length of a commute has far-reaching effects. Studies have linked lengthy commutes to numerous health problems, psychological disorders, income rates and even divorce rates.

“It has huge quality of life implications if you're not spending that much time in the car,” Duthie said.

Barbour, the marketing manager, said the extra time has allowed her to cook for her family most of the week. Her family also has adopted a Yorkie puppy named Trixie to accompany their 3-year-old Weimaraner named Bowie.

“(It) will be completely insane when ‘normal’ office days return,” she said.