Skip to main content

StreetLight Data reveals longest commutes to work across US

Commuters in the US state of Maine travel 9.8 miles to work on a daily basis, a 72% longer journey than the 5.7-mile median commute in Wyoming, according to the latest report by StreetLight Data. The transportation analytics company conducted its study on nearly 30,000 ZIP codes in areas with over 1,000 residents as part of a strategy to help encourage businesses and governments to start fixing the accessibility gap. The inquiry also highlighted the longest and shortest commutes in each state by ZIP cod
March 12, 2018 Read time: 2 mins
Commuters in the US state of Maine travel 9.8 miles to work on a daily basis, a 72% longer journey than the 5.7-mile median commute in Wyoming, according to the latest report by StreetLight Data. The transportation analytics company conducted its study on nearly 30,000 ZIP codes in areas with over 1,000 residents as part of a strategy to help encourage businesses and governments to start fixing the accessibility gap.


The inquiry also highlighted the longest and shortest commutes in each state by ZIP code. California's ZIP 92309 showed the worst median commute of 115.4 miles while North Carolina’s ZIP 28575 had the shortest commute of 0.2 miles.

City by City results revealed that Bishop, California, is the Metropolitan area with the longest one-way commute of 70.2 miles. However, the 4,787-low population core-based statistical area (CBSA) may be over-influenced by a few extreme commuters. Ocean Pines, Maryland-Delaware’s population of 50,375 came second with a median commute distance of 29.2 miles.

Laramie, Wyoming, is the CBSA with the shortest commute of 1.7 miles with a population of 35,221. It is followed by Kansas’ population of 25,292 who travel 2.1 miles to work. The report noted that some of the rural CBSA's may be influenced by people who work on farms located close to their homes.

Additionally, cities such as Oxford, Mississippi, has students that attend Universities as their place of work and who often live nearby. It has a population of 43,250 and a median commute distance of 3.2 miles.

A full copy of the report is available %$Linker: 2 External <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><dictionary /> 0 0 0 link-external here false https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/519045/Commutes%20Across%20America_180201_LR.pdf false false%>.

Related Content

  • Zipcar founder: ‘Car-dominant city has reached its zenith’
    May 23, 2018
    Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase has called on urban authorities to embrace multimodal transport in a bid to improve mobility.“The value of a car-dominant city has reached its zenith,” she says in an interview with ITS International. “The city regulatory and physical infrastructure has been built on a personal car-dominant infrastructure. We have spent the last 100 years making car travel in cities the most convenient and cheapest way to the exclusion of everything else.” That creates problems, she
  • Bologna rewards ‘green’ travel with free beer
    November 1, 2018
    Travellers in the Italian city of Bologna are being incentivised to give up their cars with the offer of beer, ice cream or cinema tickets. An anti-pollution initiative rewards people who cycle, walk or take public transport. A hundred local businesses have signed up to the programme – called Bella Mossa (or ‘Good Job’) - to give away discount vouchers, the BBC reports. Funded by the European Union and Bologna’s local government, Bella Mossa runs for six months of the year. Users download an app, log thei
  • BART launches multi-modal trip planner app in San Francisco
    April 2, 2019
    Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) has launched a trip planner app in San Francisco to provide commuters with access to various transportation modes and information on service disruptions. The BART Trip Planner was developed in collaboration with HaCon – whose software processes transit data from more than 30 operators including buses, trains, ferries and cable cars. BART says the app takes walking, cycling and car routes and the state of traffic into account to give users a realistic comparison of their c
  • BART launches multi-modal trip planner app in San Francisco
    April 2, 2019
    Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) has launched a trip planner app in San Francisco to provide commuters with access to various transportation modes and information on service disruptions. The BART Trip Planner was developed in collaboration with HaCon – whose software processes transit data from more than 30 operators including buses, trains, ferries and cable cars. BART says the app takes walking, cycling and car routes and the state of traffic into account to give users a realistic comparison of their c