Commuting in Transit Versus Automobile Neighborhoods

In recent years, there has been a chorus of calls to redesign America's suburbs so that they are less dependent on automobile access and more conducive to transit riding, walking, and bicycling. This article compares commuting characteristics of transit-oriented and auto-oriented suburban neighborhoods, in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Southern California. Transit neighborhoods averaged higher densities and had more gridded street patterns compared to their nearby counterparts with auto-oriented physical designs. Neighborhoods were matched in terms of median incomes and, to the extent possible, transit service levels, to control for these effects. For both metropolitan areas, pedestrian modal shares and trip generation rates tended to be considerably higher in transit than in auto-oriented neighborhoods. Transit neighborhoods had decidedly higher rates of bus commuting only in the Bay Area. Islands of transit-oriented neighborhoods in a sea of freeway-oriented suburbs seem to have negligible effects on transit commuting.