Public transit commute share, explained
Share of workers using public transportation (excluding taxicab) as their primary commute mode. Source: ACS B08301.
What it measures
The public-transit share is the percentage of workers 16 and older who commute by bus, subway or elevated rail, light rail or streetcar, commuter rail, ferry, or other public transportation. Taxi and ride-share are explicitly excluded (they have their own categories). The metric captures only commute trips, not the much larger universe of non-work transit trips (shopping, school, medical, recreation), so it understates the role of transit in places where work commutes are only a fraction of total transit ridership.
Why it matters
Public-transit share is the cleanest single indicator of how serious a metro's transit system is. Federal Transit Administration funding formulas, transit-oriented-development planning, and the economic case for new rail or BRT lines all hinge on commute-share data. Metros with transit shares above 10% have meaningful systems that shape land use, housing supply, and downtown viability. Metros with shares below 2% have systems that primarily serve transit-dependent populations (low-income, non-driving, disabled) rather than the broader workforce.
Top US places by public transit to work
Top 25 per geography type from the latest ACS vintage. See the full ranking links for the complete eligible universe.
Top states (2024)
SEE ALL 51 →Top metro areas (2024)
SEE ALL 925 →Top counties (2024)
SEE ALL 3,144 →Top cities (2024)
SEE ALL 6,826 →Top ZIP codes (2024)
SEE ALL 16,889 →How the Census measures it
ACS Table B08301. CensusEasy reports the sum of all public-transit categories (bus, subway/elevated, light rail/streetcar, commuter rail, ferry, other) as the transit share.
How to read the numbers
The US public-transit commute share is about 4%, but the national figure obscures enormous variation. The New York metro is the US transit outlier at about 30% (NYC itself is above 50%). The next tier, San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, clusters in the 10-15% range. Most other US metros sit below 5%, with rates under 1% common in Sunbelt and rural metros. The share has been roughly flat at the metro level since 1990 in most places; the major exception is metros that opened new rail lines (Seattle, Phoenix, Charlotte, Denver), which have seen transit shares rise modestly off low bases.
Caveats and limitations
Transit-share data captures only commute trips. Total transit ridership (commute plus non-commute) is a different metric and varies differently across metros. The ACS also includes ferries and other surface transportation; in coastal metros like Seattle, San Francisco, and the New York region the ferry component can be a meaningful share of the total. Compare with vehicle-availability metrics to disambiguate "transit by choice" vs "transit by necessity."