Contents
- Car commuting statistics: Who drives alone, carpools, or uses a private vehicle?
- Car commuting statistics: How usual commute mode shares changed over time
- Car commuting statistics: How long and far are private vehicle commutes?
- Car commuting statistics: When do commute trips begin?
- Car commuting statistics: How usual and actual commute modes compare
- Sources
Car commuting statistics: Who drives alone, carpools, or uses a private vehicle?
Two surveys describe vehicle commuting in different ways. The American Community Survey (ACS) asks workers about their usual means of getting to work. The National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) reports a usual commute mode and also records travel-day trips. Those definitions matter: “drove alone” is a more specific category than using an auto, truck, van, or SUV, which can include shared rides.
In the 2024 ACS 1-year estimate, 69.2% of U.S. workers drove alone to work. The 2022 NHTS, by comparison, classified 90.5% of workers as usually commuting by auto, truck, van, or SUV. These figures are not competing measurements of the same category: one identifies solo driving, while the other groups private vehicle types as a usual mode. Source: Census Bureau, United States Commuting At A Glance; Source: FHWA, Summary of Travel Trends: 2022 National Household Travel Survey, Table 7-2
The NHTS gives additional context for workers’ usual modes in 2022. Public transit was reported by 4.1%, walking by 2.9%, and the “Other” category by 2.5%. “Other” includes modes not specifically cited in the table. Together, these figures show that private vehicles were the dominant usual commute category in that survey, while transit, walking, and other modes each represented smaller reported shares. Source: FHWA, Summary of Travel Trends: 2022 National Household Travel Survey, Table 7-2
| Survey measure | Population and period | Reported share |
|---|---|---|
| Drove alone to work | U.S. workers, 2024 ACS 1-year estimate | 69.2% |
| Auto, truck, van, or SUV as usual mode | Workers, 2022 NHTS | 90.5% |
| Public transit as usual mode | Workers, 2022 NHTS | 4.1% |
| Walking as usual mode | Workers, 2022 NHTS | 2.9% |
| “Other” usual mode | Workers, 2022 NHTS | 2.5% |
Sources: Census Bureau, United States Commuting At A Glance; FHWA, Summary of Travel Trends: 2022 National Household Travel Survey, Table 7-2](https://nhts.ornl.gov/media/2022/pub/2022_NHTS_Summary_Travel_Trends.pdf)
Car commuting statistics: How usual commute mode shares changed over time
The NHTS series for workers who usually commuted by auto, truck, van, or SUV reports 90.8% in 2001, 89.4% in 2009, 87.5% in 2017, and 90.5% in 2022. The reported share declined across the first three survey years shown, then was higher in 2022. The report notes that survey methods differed over time, so the figures should be read as estimates from those survey years rather than as a perfectly uniform continuous series. Source: FHWA, Summary of Travel Trends: 2022 National Household Travel Survey, Table 7-2
The ACS brief gives a closer comparison of solo driving, carpooling, public transportation, and working from home for workers aged 16 and older in the United States, excluding Puerto Rico. Its selected 1-year estimates show that these categories moved in different directions between 2019 and 2022. The 2020 one-year ACS data had quality problems; the brief says experimental estimates were used for that year, so its comparison instead presents 2019, 2021, and 2022.
| ACS commute measure | 2019 | 2021 | 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drove alone | 75.9% | 67.8% | 68.7% |
| Carpooled | 8.9% | 7.8% | 8.6% |
| Public transportation | 5.0% | 2.5% | 3.1% |
| Worked from home | 5.7% | 17.9% | 15.2% |
The table covers workers aged 16 and older in the United States, excluding Puerto Rico; the work-from-home row includes workers who did not commute. The solo-driving, carpool, and transit shares were each lower in 2021 than in 2019 and higher in 2022 than in 2021. Working from home rose from 5.7% in 2019 to 17.9% in 2021, then stood at 15.2% in 2022. These are changes in reported shares; the figures alone do not establish why they changed. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Commuting in the United States: 2022, Figure 2
More recent ACS figures show a stable solo-driving share between 2023 and 2024: 69.2% of U.S. workers drove alone in each year. Public transportation was 3.5% in 2023 and 3.7% in 2024. These ACS figures describe usual means of transportation to work and should not be substituted for NHTS travel-day trip shares. Source: Census Bureau, United States Commuting At A Glance
Car commuting statistics: How long and far are private vehicle commutes?
The 2022 NHTS reports average characteristics for actual commute trips made in privately owned vehicles. These travel-day measures describe recorded trips, unlike the ACS’s mean one-way commute time for workers across commute modes. The table gives the full available series for the NHTS vehicle measure in 2017 and 2022.
| NHTS year | Average trip length | Average travel time | Average speed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 11.84 miles | 25.01 minutes | 25.22 miles per hour |
| 2022 | 13.56 miles | 26.94 minutes | 26.59 miles per hour |
The trip-length and travel-time averages are for privately owned vehicle commute trips recorded in the travel-day file. The speed measure applies to those vehicle commute trips with both mileage and travel-time information. Keeping the measures together makes their scope clear: they are not all-worker commute averages, and the speed figure has a more specific included-trip condition. Source: FHWA, Summary of Travel Trends: 2022 National Household Travel Survey, Table 7-4
For all commute modes combined, the ACS mean one-way travel time for U.S. workers was 27.2 minutes in 2024, compared with 26.8 minutes in 2023. The 2024 ACS also reports that 9.3% of workers had a one-way commute lasting 60 minutes or more, up from 8.9% in 2023. These figures include all modes and therefore do not measure private-vehicle travel time alone. Source: Census Bureau, United States Commuting At A Glance
Car commuting statistics: When do commute trips begin?
FHWA’s 2022 NHTS weekday table counts commute-purpose trips by the hour they started, across modes. It is not a car-only departure profile. Among the selected times, 7 a.m. was the reported peak, with 5,242 million weekday commute trips starting in that hour. The neighboring morning hours in the table were also substantial: 3,380 million began at 6 a.m. and 3,419 million at 8 a.m.
| Weekday start hour, 2022 | Commute-purpose trips (millions) |
|---|---|
| 6 a.m. | 3,380 |
| 7 a.m. | 5,242 |
| 8 a.m. | 3,419 |
The afternoon selected hours show another concentration. The table records 2,712 million weekday commute trips starting at 3 p.m., 3,916 million at 4 p.m., and 3,722 million at 5 p.m. FHWA describes 7 a.m. as the most common weekday travel start time overall and says commuting followed the same pattern as overall travel. These hourly counts are commute-purpose trips across transportation modes, not a count of private vehicle trips or individual commuters. Source: FHWA, Our Nation’s Highways 2026: Travel, Table 3-10
Car commuting statistics: How usual and actual commute modes compare
A usual commute mode and a mode recorded on a particular travel day answer different questions. In the NHTS, 91.7% of workers identified driving alone as their usual commute mode. On the recorded travel day, drive-alone travel accounted for 93.3% of actual commute mode share. The first figure describes workers’ usual pattern; the second describes commute mode on that day. Source: FHWA, Summary of Travel Trends: 2022 National Household Travel Survey, Table 7-3
The NHTS table also reports actual mode within each usual-mode group. Among workers who usually drove alone, 91.1% drove alone on the recorded travel day. Among workers who usually used public transit, 0.5% drove alone that day. The corresponding drive-alone shares were 0.8% among workers who usually walked and 0.4% among workers who usually biked. Each is conditional on the named usual-mode row; these values do not describe the entire worker population. Source: FHWA, Summary of Travel Trends: 2022 National Household Travel Survey, Table 7-3
For other actual commute modes, the 2022 NHTS reports 2.2% for public transit, 2.5% for walking, and 0.7% for biking on the recorded travel day. Read alongside the conditional figures, these measures show both the overall travel-day distribution and how a worker’s usual mode can differ from the mode reported for one day. They describe the survey’s recorded day and do not by themselves establish how often any worker changes modes across a week. Source: FHWA, Summary of Travel Trends: 2022 National Household Travel Survey, Table 7-3