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100,000 SF residents spend at least 90 minutes commuting to work each day
| ocher point | 04/25/18 |
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Date: April 25th, 2018 3:44 PM Author: ocher point Whether by car, bus, train or plane, more than 100,000 San Francisco residents spend at least 90 minutes commuting to work each day, a new study finds. The Bay Area housing affordability crisis is likely to blame – and it's pushing up commute times across Northern California cities.
A decade ago, the city's share of "super commuters" — those with daily commute times over 90 minutes — was considerably lower. The population of super commuters in the city grew by 112.7 percent between 2005 and 2016, according to a study of U.S. Census data compiled by Apartment List.
Outside San Francisco, the share of Northern California super commuters is even higher. In Stockton, 80 miles east of San Francisco, 10 percent of the city's commuters travel more than 90 minutes to get to work.
According to the study, Stockton has the highest share of super commuters of any other major U.S. metro.
Modesto and Riverside in Southern California follow Stockton in the Apartment List ranking; of all commuters in both cities, 7.3 percent are considered super commuters. San Francisco ranked No. 6, with a 4.8 percent share.
A 90-minute trek to work has not always been the regional standard. All the Northern California cities Apartment List surveyed showed massive increases in the share of their residents considered "super commuters."
Stockton, San Jose, Fresno and Sacramento all saw spikes in super commuting since 2005, by 44.7 percent, 96.8 percent, 13.3 percent and 40.9 percent respectively.
Setup Timeout Error: Setup took longer than 30 seconds to complete. The five worst commutes in the Bay Area (in reverse order) as derived from Caltrans traffic data and estimates of the number of hours annually that drivers spend creeping along at speeds below 35 mph.
Media: Martin do Nascimento RELATED STORIES SF has the worst commute in the U.S., and it may have cost the city $10.6 billion last year A new trend in statewide migration: Californians ditching coastal cities and moving inland This nurse commutes 2,600 miles to work in Oakland. Is he nuts? While the study does not specify where the super commuters are going, one can easily speculate that they're traveling to the Bay Area, where employment opportunities are plentiful and affordable homes sparse.
This cocktail — ample jobs and limited housing — gives rise to super commuting, most experts agree.
The phenomenon disproportionately affects lower-income people across the nation, but especially in tech-dominant cities like San Francisco and Seattle. A 2015 Zillow study found lower-income workers in San Francisco typically have longer commutes than higher-income workers. The trend arose over the last 10 years and "indicates a rapid deterioration in housing affordability for low-income workers" near the city center.
People aren't just moving to the suburbs of San Francisco — they're moving out of the Bay Area altogether, to cities with more affordable housing that are still reasonably close to the employment hub.
In recent years, researchers have begun noticing an odd trend in California migration patterns: The populations of inland counties are growing faster than that of urban coastal counties.
Phuong Nguyen, a research specialist at the California Department of Finance, began noticing the influx of Californians to inland regions, like San Joaquin and Sacramento, around 2014.
"We were surprised at that," Nguyen said. California's coastal regions have historically drawn in-state migrants who leave their provincial hometowns in search of employment opportunity and urban environments.
The Department of Finance continued tracking the data into 2016 and 2017 and discovered the growth of California regions located further from the Pacific Ocean persisted. Nguyen expects the trend to continue in coming years.
It's a development that runs counter to the long-held narrative of small-town folks picking up and moving to their state's hubs of culture and commerce. Californians are still doing that – San Francisco's population grew just under a percentage point in 2017, per new Department of Finance data – but they may not like what they're finding.
Long commutes create problems for everyone – even those who live reasonably close to their offices. The San Francisco-Bay Area has one of the nastiest commutes in the country, according to a 2017 study by INRIX.
The study estimated that idling in traffic cost individual drivers $2,250 and San Francisco $10.6 billion in 2017. (INRIX found these figure by calculating the direct and indirect costs from the traffic jams: "Direct costs relate to the value of fuel and time wasted, and indirect costs refer to freight and business fees from company vehicles idling in traffic, which are passed on to households through higher prices.")
Fed up with the startling condition of Bay Area roads, some people are deciding to leave the region altogether. A 2017 poll by the Bay Area Council found 40 percent of current Bay Area residents are considering leaving in the next few years, with the region's housing woes, cost of living and traffic cited as the predominant factors inciting residents' discontent. |