commuting

We compare the strengths and weaknesses of driving, and/or riding the train or bus, from the Forest City to the Windy City.

Personal cars remained the most popular way survey respondents reported getting to work—over 55 percent of respondents have said they use a personal car to commute since September.

One shuttle will take Chicagoans from Hinsdale or Elmhurst to Oak Brook job centers. The other will squire Napervillians to their Loop offices.

The handful of cities that led the rebound of U.S. bike commuting a decade ago seem to have slowed down — but growth elsewhere suggests that progress can still happen.

Cross-posted from City Observatory

The decline is small in number, but in the scheme of things, it's huge: New census data [PDF] out last week show car commuting among Americans is finally, after decades of growth, starting to reverse itself.

The federal government spends billions of dollars a year on tax subsidies that make traffic congestion worse, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by TransitCenter and the Frontier Group. The culprit is the parking commuter tax benefit, which costs taxpayers $7.3 billion in foregone revenue each year, all while adding more than 800,000 cars to rush-hour traffic on the nation's roads each workday, the authors estimate.

The Census Bureau released American Community Survey estimates for 2013 last week, which report that the number of people biking to work in Chicago has decreased from 1.6 percent in 2012 to 1.4 percent in 2013. This could well prove to be a one-year blip against a broader, multi-year trend that has seen bike commuting nearly triple since 2000.

The rate at which women are signing up for new Divvy memberships is slowly increasing, but the rate at which female members use Divvy for trips is increasing even more slowly.