On average, each man, woman, and child in this country spends an hour a day traveling in cars and buses or walking. The 100 million U.S. households generate more than a billion person trips and over nine billion person-miles of travel in a typical day. Together, increasing demand for transportation, growing affluence of travelers, and rising values of goods being shipped have placed a premium on fast, reliable transportation. The highway transportation system serves households and businesses in a variety of ways.

Commuting

Through the Transit Performance Monitoring System (TPMS), FTA collected data between 1996 and 1998 from onboard passenger surveys of auto ownership, frequency of transit use, and transit trip purpose to gain a better understanding of user characteristics and differences across geographic regions and cities of varying sizes.

Forty-nine percent of rail users and 68 percent of all users surveyed did not have access to a car at the time they made their trip. Slightly more than 70 percent of all the transit trips in the surveys were made by passengers using transit 5 days or more a week. Fifty percent of all passengers surveyed were on their way to or from work. The most frequently reported way of reaching transit was by walking, with about 70 percent of all those surveyed starting their transit trip in this way.

The following pie chart shows the composition of mobility, congestion mitigation, and location efficiency benefits provided by transit to transit riders. In many cases, trips provide more than one type of benefit. Transit also provides significant environmental and other benefits which onboard passenger surveys are unable to capture.