A Bus and a Car

Chart of the Day: Minneapolis-Saint Paul Metro Travel Mode Shares

These graphs display the portion of weighted* trips collected within the Minnneapolis-Saint Paul metro area through the National Household Travel Survey. As we can see driving is still the overwhelmingly predominant mode throughout the region, but what is interesting is how much walking there is in comparison to all other non-drive modes! Take a look at the data for yourself (from the National Household Travel Survey).

2 Pie charts, the top one is dominated by a 84% personal vehicle gray slice. The bottom represents the other 16% and has walking at *% in blue, with near equal sized slices for bicycling, transit and school buses at 2.5% and a final smaller green slice for other.

Total trips are predominantly driving. Of non-personal vehicle modes, that walking is nearly 1/2 is interesting, as is that school buses carry nearly as many people as both cycling and transit.

Looking specifically at commute patterns shows a generally similar breakdown.

2 Pie charts, with the top being dominated by an 82.5% slice in gray, representing personal vehicles. The lower chart has the remainder of the slices as a new pie, with 50% of this chart being walking, just under 25% being cycling and just over 25% being transit.

A slightly lesser personal-vehicle mode share, but again, 50% of non-drive trips are on foot!

I tried to make more charts for denser areas only using the data’s filters, but only 95 commute trips were found in the entire area denser than 4000 persons/sq mile (about 1/2 Minneapolis’s overall density, or 2/3 Saint Paul’s total density) which made me view estimates as unreliable.

*Corrected due to missing data and unreturned surveys

Joseph Totten

About Joseph Totten

Joe is a graduate of Civil Engineering-Transportation and Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota, and has a masters degree from Portland State University. Born and raised in Saint Paul, Joe has worked with nonprofits and public agencies in MSP and Portland.