NC in Focus: Commuting by Public Transportation

North Carolina’s 4.2 million workers mainly get to work by car: 81% drive alone and 10% carpool. Working at home (4.4%) and walking (1.8%) are the next most common means of transportation according to the 2009-13 American Community Survey. Only about 1.2% or 50,000 individuals use public transportation to get to work (including taxicabs). North Carolina has the 32^nd highest share of workers using public transportation to commute to work.

Excluding taxi users, nearly 46,000 North Carolinians or 1.1% of resident workers use public transportation to get to work. Five counties have higher public transportation usage rates than the state as a whole: Orange (7.6%), Durham (3.6%), Mecklenburg (3.4%), Guilford (1.5%), and Watauga (1.2%).

The state’s public transit riders are concentrated in the largest urban areas. More than 15,000 or 33% of all public transit riders live in Mecklenburg County. Another 27% live in one of the core counties of the Triangle (Wake, Orange, or Durham). Nearly 11% live in the core Triad counties, Guilford and Forsyth.

Most public transit riders live and work in the same county (86%), but 12% cross county lines on their public transit commute. Four of the top 5 cross-county commuting flows are among the Triangle area’s 3 core counties, commuting facilitated by Triangle Transit, a cross-county public transportation service. Union County into Mecklenburg is the second largest cross-county commuting flow via public transit.

Read more about North Carolina commuting patterns:

• County-to-County Commuting Patterns
• NC in Focus: Mode of Transportation to Work
• County-to-County Commuting by Work County