For those who live in cities served by public transit, this is the perfect time to make a commuting habit that could save you money and improve your health.
Morning commuters wait for the MARC and Amtrak trains in New Carrollton, Maryland.
Photographer: Linda Davidson / The Washington Post via Getty Images
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By Kendra Pierre-Louis
January 1, 2025 at 7:00 AM CST
New Year's resolutions tend to take on a certain flavor: Pay off debts, eat healthier, exercise more. But this year, city residents might consider mixing things up and embarking on a habit that would be better for the planet’s health as well as your own. It might even be more convenient. This New Year’s, consider pledging to take public transit.
Only 3.1% of US adults use public transportation to get to work, according to 2022 data from the Census Bureau, down from 5% in 2019. That year, almost 76% of Americans said they drove alone to work, a number that fell to 68.7% in 2022 as more people reported working from home. Among those who take transit, 70% were located in one of seven metropolitan areas — Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, DC.
This heavy reliance on private vehicles comes with a steep cost — both personally and to the environment (not to mention the fiscal health of your local transit agency). The average US household spends $13,174 per year on transportation, more than 85% of which go to car payments, gas and other automotive expenses. Driving costs help make transportation the second-largest expenditure for Americans after housing, representing roughly 17% of household income. In the European Union, it’s only 11%.
Transportation also accounts for 28% of US greenhouse gas emissions, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, with nearly 60% coming from cars, SUVs and pickup trucks. And while electric vehicles can help reduce that figure, research from the California Air Resources Board and others have found that switching to battery-power alone is not enough. To stave off the worst effects of climate change, fewer people need to be driving.
And yet getting more people in the US out of their cars has been difficult. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, transit ridership was falling in most US cities, with success stories such as Seattle’s expanding bus ridership standing out as a rare exception. Even nudges such as offering free fares have not substantially moved people from behind the steering wheel and onto trains, buses and light rail.
A big part of that problem is structural — lots of US communities simply don’t have good enough transit service. But even in cities with bus and train networks that are adequate for commuting, many people still opt to drive. For some of them, driving to work is just a habit, and habits are hard to break. Research has found that people will only change their commuting habits “when they’re starting a new job or when they’re moving,” says Ariella Kristal, a behavioral scientist and postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University. “But they’re not just going to, in the middle of daily life, change an entrenched habit.”
This is bad news not just for transit agencies, but for commuters themselves. One study led by Rababe Saadaoui, a doctoral candidate at Arizona State University, found that when people relied on cars for more than 50% of their daily activities, their life satisfaction declined.
“When you use your car, it provides benefits but up to a certain point,” said Saadaoui. “When you reach over-reliance on cars, we see a negative application between car dependence and their life satisfaction.” In other words, car usage has something of a Goldilocks effect — too much or too little and we’re left wanting.
Similarly, a transit commute might be some people’s best option — they just don’t know it. That’s because people rarely experiment with how they get around, due to a concept called “satisficing.” The word, a portmanteau of the words “satisfy” and “suffice,” was coined by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon. Simon’s work suggests that people often filter through every possible option and rapidly settle on one that is “good enough.” But many commutes could benefit from some experimentation, not least because of the digital navigation tools that are widely relied on to get around. The problem, notes Shaun Larcom, a lecturer in environmental economics and policy at the University of Cambridge, is these tools “often don’t take into account many of the elements associated with a good or pleasant journey.” They just prioritize speed.
When we plug a trip into our GPS, it might automatically pick the driving route as the fastest option, but it doesn’t consider how long it would take to find parking, for example, or how much that would cost. It also doesn’t weigh how we plan to spend our commuting time. Transit riders are free to read, nap, catch up on email, or do all manner of screen-based diversions and chores (plus, walking or cycling to stations provides some much-needed exercise). For those sitting behind the wheel, listening to music, podcasts or audiobooks is just about the only safe option, as attention and eyes need to be focused on the road.
In a recent Slate article, New York City teacher Jacqueline LeKachman confessed to loving her three-hour round-trip subway commute for giving her the space to not only decompress from work before entering a home full of roommates, but to also get writing done. She managed to pick up some editing work on the side that she only completes on the train — all things she’d struggled to do with a shorter commute.
None of this is an argument in favor of longer commutes — research has shown that typically longer commutes, especially by car, are associated with increased risks of everything from hypertension and diabetes to depression (although the risk seems to decline with non-driving commutes). It is, however, an argument in favor of transport experimentation, something that Larcom saw first-hand in a study that he co-authored looking at the impact of a February 2014 transit strike in London.
That year, workers on the London Underground went on strike for two days, shutting down some but not all Tube stations. The interruption forced residents to find creative ways to get to work, school and other destinations. It also enabled researchers to see how the strike shifted people’s routines. When the strike ended, while many people resumed their old routes, a sizable minority shifted their commutes — permanently.
“People didn't stick to their original routes because they found better ways to get to work,” said Larcom.
The trick was getting them to try a different route in the first place. Something like a New Year’s resolution might help with that.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-01/for-a-healthier-happier-2025-try-commuting-on-public-transit
