Volunteers Drive, Yankees Ride

Data from the American Community Surveys of the U.S. Census bureau revealed that the states of Tennessee and New York hold the extreme positions on the commuting scale. New York residents take transit the most and Tennessee residents drive the most. Exempting personal choice as an explanation, the lion share of the causes can be distributed among planning, policy and geography. Availability of services and space, density levels in the CBD and policy choices weigh considerably in their contributions to commuters’ decisions on how to transport themselves to and from work each day.

Polarized Landscapes

The south has traditionally been an incubator for a high concentration of factories, producing a veritable mix of goods from air compressors, medicine bottles and faucets to automobile brake components and home appliances. Southern states and municipalities tend to be very friendly to this industry, offering tax breaks and the like for the sake of adding jobs to the local economy. A bonus for the employers is that labor unions typically don’t exist in the region. With these incentives, manufacturers flock to the south. Industrial parks filled with cinder block buildings blot out swaths of land on the outskirts of towns where people don’t live. Workers are expected to shoulder the full burden of getting to work and back. Providing commuting options is not a critical factor, if considered at all, when terms of agreement between the business and government are established. They simply don’t have to because the problems that fit a transit solution are not there. Without a viable alternative though, many workers are simply forced to drive themselves even if they wanted to take transit. However, driving is not such a bad thing when you don’t have to endure the twice a day gauntlet morning and evening peak rush hours and on top of that pay for parking once you arrive at your destination.

In contrast, the northern metropolitan areas have both push and pull factors at work instead of just one or the other. There is a high density of traffic and a higher concentration of offices and buildings. The streets are congested and costs and hassles of owning a car can be overwhelming. Meanwhile, via one mode or another, the commuter has several options when deciding how best to plan a trip. While a large portion of the population uses transit, ridership is still increasing due in part to the fact that Yankees tend to pay higher gas prices while Volunteers pay the lowest in the nation. Yankees are continuously being pushed from many sides to find alternatives. When they’re available, those options pull commuters to the services.

Conclusion

The wide open spaces of the south still embody the American spirit. Driving your own car on long stretches of road is a quintessential symbol of personal freedom in the US. It will take painful conditions similar to the north to abandon such nostalgic notions. It can be expected that these sorts of statistics won’t see any significant variations soon unless congestion, space limitations and related problems force leaders in the south to put emphasis on mass transit as part of a comprehensive solution.