Access to job opportunities by driving and transit declined between 2022 and 2023 in most large U.S. cities, but it improved by walking and biking, according to new research from CTS’s Accessibility Observatory. The ninth annual Access Across America (AAA) study uses the most current comprehensive walking, biking, transit, and auto travel data to analyze the performance of these transportation options for residents of major urban areas.
The AAA study reports summarize millions of trip opportunities, measured from every residential block in the U.S. (numbering over 8 million origins). Program researchers gather the latest jobs location data from the U.S. Census and classify these locations as potential trip destinations. Using detailed information about roadway speeds, transit service, bicycle facilities, and more, the researchers apply custom trip planning software to quantify how many jobs could be reached in a given amount of travel time from a specific starting point.
Summing up these opportunities across the largest urban areas gives a value—called accessibility—that measures how well each city’s transportation system and land use are working together. Because AO researchers have been measuring these opportunities consistently each year since 2015, they can track changes over time. This has been especially important since the COVID pandemic fundamentally disrupted travel patterns beginning in 2020.
In general, the dynamic reconfiguration of job numbers and locations in the early COVID era stabilized somewhat in 2023. While all but six urban areas saw reduced access to jobs during the morning peak by driving (auto), the reductions were smaller than in the 2022 report. Access to opportunities declined the most in those cities where congestion had increased the most—particularly San Francisco, San Jose, and Washington, DC. For example, compared to 2022, the typical worker in the San Francisco region lost access to 163,000 jobs within a 30-minute drive—a 17 percent reduction. Similar patterns were observed in DC (15 percent reduction) and San Jose (12 percent reduction), among other cities. These changes were not as drastic as observed in the 2022 AAA report, when congestion made an abrupt return from the unusually high job accessibility by auto during the first 21 months of the pandemic.
“The continued decline of access to jobs by auto reflects the unsustainability of the patterns we saw during COVID,” says Observatory senior researcher Andrew Owen, lead author of the reports. “Even if some continued levels of telework reduce traffic from what it otherwise would be, the negative feedback loop of increased access—leading to more people choosing to use the roads—results in longer travel times.”
The changes from year to year in the local transportation modes of walking and biking were more positive. About half of large U.S. cities had higher average access to job opportunities in 2023 than they did in 2022. Charlotte and Cincinnati were in the top five cities with increased access for each mode of walking, biking, and transit. In Charlotte, residents could on average reach 12 percent more job destinations by biking on low-stress networks, 5 percent more jobs via public transit, and 4 percent more by walking/rolling. Cincinnati’s improvements were nearly identical (increases of 7 percent, 5 percent, and 4 percent, respectively). While the overall average walking accessibility is highest in the urban centers of New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle, only Chicago saw year-over-year improvement (up 1.8 percent).
Job access via public transit (which includes the walk or roll portions of the trip to and from transit stops) mostly decreased across large U.S. urban areas in the 2023 evaluation. In contrast to the declines in auto access, which are driven by travel behavior, the declines in transit accessibility are influenced by the frequency and speed of an urban area’s transit service. Challenges such as hiring enough drivers and mechanics and funding uncertainty from long-term loss of fares have led some agencies to pare back service. This has resulted in lower accessibility even where overall growth in the number of jobs has continued. Some bright spots in the year-over-year changes included 6 percent increases in Kansas City and 4 percent in Phoenix. Still, these increases begin from low baselines: the average worker in Phoenix could reach 28,000 jobs in a 40-minute transit commute—a meager 1.3 percent of the jobs available in the region. Kansas City’s typical transit commuter would reach a similar 1.2 percent of jobs, just 13,000 of the 1.05 million job opportunities in the region.
This annual research project is sponsored by the National Accessibility Evaluation pooled-fund study, a multiyear effort led by the Minnesota Department of Transportation and supported by partners that include the Federal Highway Administration, 11 additional state DOTs, and the Metropolitan Council of the Twin Cities. In fall 2025, the tenth AAA report will be released, covering the 2024 travel year and marking a decade of continuous access measurement. Eric Lind, Accessibility Observatory director, calls it a turning point for how DOT partners use the data.
“In some ways we have only scratched the surface of what accessibility data can tell us about how the transportation system performs, and what to expect going forward,” Lind explains. “As we better understand the details of what’s possible in urban daily travel, we can better inform the decisions about how cities will look in another 10 and 20 years.”
The Accessibility Observatory is the nation’s leading resource for the research and application of accessibility-based transportation system evaluation. Visit the Observatory’s website for the Access Across America research reports for auto, transit, walking, and biking and associated publicly available data, as well as other related research projects.
—CTS research staff
