Photo by ellievanhoutte.Those who use public transportation for incredibly long commutes on a daily basis will no doubt be able to verify the findings of a new report by the Brookings Institution on transit in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. The report reveals that a majority of the Washington metropolitan statistical area’s jobs are not located within a 90-minute radius of Metro and other regional transit systems.
Brookings ranked the Washington metropolitan area 17th overall in its list of 100 transit systems, which included not only Metrorail and Metrobus, but also MARC, VRE, the Fairfax Connector, Montgomery County’s Ride On buses and several other Maryland and Virginia transit networks. According to the study’s findings, 82 percent of the region’s residents live within three-quarters of a mile of a transit stop, and the median wait for some kind of transit during rush hour is only 6.6 minutes. But while those are positive findings, most jobs are located in the suburbs, where using public transit to get to the office often takes significantly more time: only 17.1 percent of all Washington area jobs are accessible by transit within an hour, while only 8.8 percent of them are accessible within 45 minutes.
The entire report can be read below.
