How long are American commutes?

By R.A. | WASHINGTON

LAST week, the OECD released a report attempting to assess different characteristics of well-being across member countries. Rather than focus just on statistics like income and employment, its authors tried to build a more meaningful portrait of quality of life, which included information on things like health and work-life balance. The New York Times' Catherine Rampell focused on one particular piece of the report—differences in commuting time across countries. Here's the table she produced:

As you can see, America performs quite well on this score. This surprised me, since it was sharply at odds from work I'd found on the subject in reporting a piece on infrastructure from earlier this year. You can see the data I found at right. These figures have been cited in economic research assessing the cost of commuting. America's commuting times, according to these sources, stack up very poorly against those of other countries.

How should we explain the divergence? Some of the gap may be due to methodology. The OECD's figures are derived from its time-use surveys, for instance. Here is how the OECD explains its data-collection method:

Data on time use are collected through the use of diaries, where respondents record their activities during short (around 10 minute) intervals for a continuous period of 24 hours (or 1440 minutes). Respondents use their own words to describe their activities, either by writing their own diaries, or by verbally reporting their activities by telephone, which are then re-coded according to the country's classification system.

The European figures in the chart at right, by contrast, are from the European working-conditions survey. This survey uses a questionaire, and during each assessment period face-to-face field interviews are conducted with a random sample of firms and workers in each country. That methodology—questionaire plus field interviews—is similar to that used by the American Census Bureau, from which the American number in the chart at right is taken. The figure has actually been updated through 2010 at this point. According to the Census Bureau, the average American spends over 50 minutes a day commuting—almost twice the OECD's figure.

The actual figure may be somewhere between the two estimates, but I'm inclined to put more stock in the official Census number. And using that number, American commute times stack up poorly against those elsewhere as measured by both the OECD and the European survey.

One final point concerning commuting times. In commenting on the OECD study, Brad Plumer writes:

A lot also depends on whether a person drives or takes public transportation. The Department of Transportation found that, in 2009, commutes by private car took, on average, 23 minutes. Public transportation, by contrast, took an average of 53 minutes. You could read that as an argument that more people should drive so that their commutes are shorter or as an argument that we need to bolster public transportation.

I see this disparity reported quite often, but rarely is it given the proper context. The vast majority of transit journeys take place in just a few very large cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Within these large cities, average commute time by car is well above the national average, and transit commutes are competitive with driving. Transit journeys will tend to take longer than automobile commutes, but the difference between the two times for a given commute is much smaller than the nationwide average times for driving versus transit suggests.