There’s a new study about park and rides and highway express buses that came out of the University of Minnesota’s CTS (Center for Transportation Studies) a few months ago. I just got a chance to look through it, and there are some cool / depressing maps that I wanted to share.
The study is about how effective suburban park-and-ride and highway express lanes can be in changing job accessibility, with the goal of using access to jobs as a measure of planning these sorts of facilities.
So there’s a lot in the report showing how many jobs people can access via suburban transit. Tucked in there, too, is a set of maps that really reveals the gap between driving and transit for people looking for employment opportunities.
First, take a gander at the driving map, showing the total number of jobs you can access with a half-hour drive:
Now check out the transit map:
Um, that is a lot fewer jobs. For someone, like me, who almost insists on finding employment that I can access without a car, that’s a pretty big limit.
Finally, here’s the transit accessibility maps shown as a percentage of the driving accessibility, with different time thresholds included for good measure.
The conclusion, at least for me, is that the vast majority of people who take transit have to spend a lot more time getting to work than people who drive. Like, a lot more…
I’ll leave other conclusions up to you. Check out the whole report online.