The Accessibility of Jobs in the U.S. When You Don’t Have A Vehicle

If you commute to work in your own car every day, you may not stop to wonder what it’s like on the other side. How difficult is it to get to work when you don’t have your own vehicle to rely on? This one thing can make a big difference when it comes time to finding a job, because you have to be able to actually get to that job every day right?

Obviously those that don’t have a vehicle will be relying on public transportation, or even walking, to get to their place of work. Something that would be very difficult to do while living in rural areas of the United States. According to a study by the American Community Survey, 76.4% of commuters drive alone to work, and only 5% use mass transit. That’s a lot of cars on the road!

Now let’s take a look at the number of jobs that are available to those that don’t have a vehicle to drive themselves to work in. This study analysed the number of jobs that are reachable by public transportation, or foot, in 49 major U.S. cities. It breaks the number of jobs down by the minutes it takes to reach them: 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60. It also excludes driving and focuses on the 7–9am travel times. Let’s take a look!

It’s no surprise to see NYC at the top for all of the 10 minute intervals. With over 8 million residents living in the city, there needs to be plenty of job opportunities to go around! And this chart proves that there are with 8.4 million jobs reachable within 60 minutes.

The 10 cities that have the greatest job accessibility (based on a weighed average of each 10 min interval) are:

1. New York, New York
2. San Francisco, California
3. Chicago, Illinois
4. Washington, D.C.
5. Boston, Massachusetts
6. Los Angeles, California
7. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
8. Seattle, Washington
9. San Jose, California
10. Denver, Colorado

There are some cities that are working hard to improve the number of jobs that are available for their transit/walking commuters. These 10 cities have shown the most improvement on this front:

1. Kansas City, Kansas (+17.36%)
2. Charlotte, North Carolina (+10.81%)
3. Austin, Texas (+9.76%)
4. Columbus, Ohio (+8.99%)
5. San Francisco, California (+8.72%)
6. Orlando, Florida (+7.88%)
7. Las Vegas, Nevada (+7.68%)
8. Phoenix, Arizona (+7.31%)
9. Minneapolis, Minnesota (+7.01%)
10. Cincinnati, Ohio (+6.78%)

How does your own city fare when it comes to job accessibility?