Driving, telecommuting are the most common ways people get to work. Neither trend bodes well for transit agencies.

The Chicago Tribune reports:

One of the fastest-growing forms of commuting is not commuting at all.

In the Chicago region, the number of people who said they usually work from home grew by 23 percent between 2013 and 2017, according to the latest estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s a total of 238,137 people who were working from home in 2017, or 5.1 percent of Chicago-area workers.


The trend is also national, with the number of people working from home up 28.3 percent in four years, to almost 8 million in 2017, surpassing the number of workers taking public transit, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Driving is still the most common way of getting to work, now followed by working from home, either for yourself or someone else.

The survey asked people to say how they “usually” get to work, meaning those working from home only once or twice a week are not counted. That means the number of people who telecommute at least occasionally is much larger.

Just a reminder the next time a big government activist talks about "the demand" for government transportation.