Workers Spending More Time on the Road

[Rose Siding]

PHILADELPHIA - To the list of extreme sports, add extreme commuting: those who travel 90 minutes or more on the trek to work. Nationally, only 2 percent of workers log those kind of one-way commuting times, but their numbers are growing, according to a 2003 Census Bureau survey released Wednesday.

In New York City and Baltimore, 5.6 percent of commuters spent 90 minutes or more on the trip into work; elsewhere, 5 percent of commuters in Riverside, Calif., and 3 percent of commuters in Philadelphia and Los Angeles spent an hour-and-a-half on the one-way commute.

The average one-way commute took 24.3 minutes in 2003, two minutes more than it took in 1990, according to the survey, which included all 50 states and cities with populations of 250,000 or more.
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Nationally, less than 5 percent of commuters took public transportation; when they did, it often took a few minutes longer to get to work than for those who drove, the survey showed. About 77 percent of commuters drive alone, compared with 73 percent in 2000.

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