Regional Spotlight- Twin Cities Area

by Rachel Vilsack
April 2011

Whether we use a car, bus, bike, or go on foot, part of our day usually involves getting to work and returning home. While commuting is not a part of the labor market data we typically collect, traveling to work is actually an important area of study in labor market statistics. The commuting patterns of where workers reside and where they work help us define labor market areas, or where regional employers draw their workforce. How and when people travel to work can also assist agencies involved in transportation planning, like the Metropolitan Council in the Twin Cities region, which studies commuting patterns to plan better strategies to reduce congestion, increase accessibility of transportation choices, and improve mobility.

Data from the annual American Community Survey give us an updated look at individuals’ journey to work. This article will include an analysis of how residents of the Twin Cities travel to work.

Getting to Work

Of the nearly 1.5 million residents of the Twin Cities who work, three out of four drove alone to work in a car, truck, or van in 2009 (see Table 1). About 5.6 percent of residents used public transportation, including bus or rail, and 3.5 percent bicycled or walked to work. Perhaps, surprisingly, only 4.5 percent of Twin Cities residents worked at home. This could include individuals who are self-employed or own micro-businesses, workers who telecommute, or workers who have some other formal arrangement with their employer.

Figure 1 looks at the same means of transportation to work for Twin Cities residents in 2009, but breaks the information down for the white (alone) working population and the minority (non-white, Hispanic, or Latino) working population. While driving alone or carpooling in a car, truck, or van is still the primary means of commuting to work, minority workers in the Twin Cities are more likely to carpool and rely on public transportation than white workers.

This analysis brings up an important concern. For some workers, the availability of public transportation may be essential to access jobs and participate in the labor force. For example, low-wage workers tend to be concentrated in the urban centers of Minneapolis and St. Paul, while the availability of low-wage jobs – often in service industries – is more readily available in the suburban areas of the region. This mismatch makes accessibility to transportation essential.

A recent report by the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota highlights this issue. They found that with the opening of the Hiawatha light-rail line in 2004, the number of low-wage jobs within 30 minutes of travel time increased by 50 percent along transit stations.[1] For low-wage workers, the accessibility to job opportunities increased with access to light-rail transportation. The study also found that the presence of the Hiawatha light-rail line caused some low-wage workers to relocate near transit stations.

Where Workers Are Coming From

Since many individuals do not live in the city – or even state – where they work, we can look at the commuting patterns of workers to understand the labor market area from which employers attract their workforce. Looking at the region’s labor shed, or where Twin Cities workers live, about 85.5 percent of workers in the Twin Cities resided in one of the region’s seven counties in 2009.[2] About 4.9 percent of the region’s workforce commuted from the surrounding counties of Wright and Sherburne. That means that nine out of 10 workers in the Twin Cities commute from just nine counties.

Despite the proximity of the state of Wisconsin, only 2.4 percent of the Twin Cities’ workforce – or about 37,000 workers – commuted from Wisconsin in 2009. Residents of St. Croix County accounted for about half of the Wisconsin residents who work in the Twin Cities region.

For the Wisconsin counties that export workers to the Twin Cities, the impact is significant. Pierce, Polk, and St. Croix counties are the three Wisconsin counties that border the eastern edge of the Twin Cities region. About 30 percent of the working-age population in these three counties commuted to Ramsey, Washington, Hennepin, and Dakota County in Minnesota for employment in 2009.

Where Residents are Going

Looking at commuting patterns, or where residents work, presents a slightly different picture. Only 1 percent of Twin Cities residents worked outside of Minnesota in 2009, but 39.5 percent of residents worked outside of their county of residence. Table 2 shows the commuting patterns by county in 2009. In the case of Hennepin County and Ramsey County, more than half of the residents work in their respective county. The five other counties in the Twin Cities region had a higher percentage of residents who worked outside their county of residence in 2009.

Hennepin County and Ramsey County are net importers of labor; these counties have more jobs than working-age residents, so these counties generally have high percentages of workers who live in another county. The other regional counties tend to have more working-age residents than jobs, so an export of labor occurs.

Commuting Time

For those workers who did not work at home in 2009, the majority (67.9 percent) commute less than 30 minutes to their job (see Table 3). Approximately 3,950 workers, or 3.7 percent, commute one hour or more to work. This distribution of commuting times for workers in the Twin Cities is very similar to the distribution in 2000, when 69.5 percent of workers travelled less than 30 minutes to work.

Telecommuting to Work

There is no commuting time when your workplace is your home. Whether you have a formal arrangement with your employer or own a home-based business, telecommuting, or telework, is said to be growing in popularity. A national survey by the Telework Advisory Group for WorldatWork found that 17.2 million U.S. workers participated in telework options in 2008.[3] The most popular locations for telework included working from home, a customer’s place of business, or from a car.[4] Telecommuting is still not the majority option for many workers; six out of 10 survey respondents did not work remotely.[5] For those who did participate in teleworking, one in three respondents did so once per month.[6]

Based on data from the American Community Survey, only a small number (less than 5 percent) of residents of the Twin Cities worked from home in 2009. The survey questionnaire itself asks for the usual means of transportation to an individual’s place of work, so many more workers may actually telecommute in some way.

Many organizations advocate telecommuting as a benefit to both workers and employers, while impacting many transportation issues, such as mitigating traffic congestion and lessening environmental pollution. eWorkPlace, a state-sponsored program for Twin Cities area employers, lists telework benefits for employers as:

• Increasing productivity
• A tool for recruitment and retention
• More geographic flexibility for workers and an increased
  talent pool for employers
• Reduced cost: real estate, overhead, absenteeism

For employees the benefits to telework include:

• A time savings
• Save money: gas, parking
• Greater productivity
• Enhanced quality of life
• Increased opportunities for lower income households
  and people with disabilities

While the actual number of employers with a formal telecommuting policy is not known, the largest employer supporting telework may be the federal government. A 2009 report from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management cited that nearly 102,900 federal employers were involved in teleworking activities.[7]

Want More?

For researchers interested in transportation trends in the Twin Cities, the amount of detailed data available will soon grow. The Metropolitan Council began its regional Travel Behavior Inventory in late 2010 to determine where, when, why, and how people travel. This survey – conducted once every decade – includes a sample of 13,000 households, riders of transit systems and users of MnPass lanes on Interstate 35W and Interstate 394, for example. The household survey involves a travel diary, which asks participants to record the location and purpose of each trip outside of their home location for an entire day.

[1]University of Minnesota, Center for Transportation Studies, www.cts.umn.edu/Research/Featured/Transitways/index.html
[2]U.S. Census Bureau, On The Map
[3]WorldatWork, Telework Trendlines 2009, www.workingfromanywhere.org/news/Trendlines_2009.pdf
[4]Ibid.
[5]Ibid.
[6]Ibid.
[7]U.S. Office of Personal Management, Status of Telework in the Federal Government: Report to Congress, 2009, www.telework.gov/
Reports_and_Studies/Annual_Reports/2009teleworkreport.pdf

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