First the bad news: The percentage of workers in the Washington region riding in carpools or vans declined about five percent between 2000 and 2006 — putting roughly 17,000 more drivers onto already crowded rush-hour roads.
Those numbers come from a just-released “Regional Travel Trends Report” issued by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. (See Table 7 on page 14.)
Now for the good news. A smaller percentage of commuters is driving solo. Commuters are shifting to transit, telecommuting, walking and biking. The number of transit riders surged from 279,000 to 393,000 over that six-year period — an increase of 114,000.
The number of people walking to work metro-wide increased by about 6,300, while the number of bicyclists rose by nearly 3,900. The number of people telecommuting rose by 19,700.
Despite the shifts in transportation mode, the absolute number of solo drivers still increased, and so did congestion. Pessimists will say that the positive numbers for transit, walking and biking are negligible in a metro region with a workforce of nearly 2.8 million. But I see the numbers as a sign that change is possible. The increase in those modes is all the more remarkable considering that the vast majority of population growth occurred in outlying municipalities of the Washington region where cars are the only transportation option. In jurisdictions where transportation alternatives exist, the gains were encouraging indeed.
(Hat tip to Jim Wamsley for this citation. His comment: “Transit ridership statistics obtained from WMATA and local jurisdiction transit systems show the growth in weekday transit ridership in the 2000 to 2006 period increasing at a rate 38% faster than that of weekday VMT. The differential in these two rates of growth rate suggests a measurable modal shift from auto to transit for some daily trips in this time period.”)
