Michael Anderson of BikePortland picked up on this:
Six neat charts from Metro’s new report about Portland-area transportation
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Metro is the only elected regional government in the United States. It’s also got one of the most interesting government communications teams in the country. …
For its latest project, a four-part “regional snapshot” about transportation, the agency pulled out all the stops: original tilt-shift photography, narrative video, text drawn from at least a dozen interviews and a whole quiver of custom-made infographics. If you want a single overview on the basics of the region’s transportation situation, I’ve never seen a better one.
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On a per-person basis, the Portland region has been driving less since 1996, even as people take about the same number of trips each day. According to Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report, the region’s residents drove just 5,000 miles per person in 2014 – that’s nearly 25 percent less than other US metro regions of similar size.
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And here’s good news – though a growing population invariably means more commuters, just under half of the workers added since 2000 drive to work alone. The majority are choosing other modes, or working from home.
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Transit ridership is climbing fast, too. In 2014, people in the Portland region took more than 103 million rides on transit. Although ridership has fluctuated over the last 10 years, overall transit ridership has grown faster than the region’s population, faster than the number of miles driven each day and faster than transit service has grown.
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The majority of the region’s freight is still moved by truck. However, as Oregon’s economy has shifted from bulk products like farm exports and timber to lighter products like semiconductors, electronics and specialized machinery, the the region is moving fewer tons of goods around. But these lightweight products are higher-valued – as a result, the overall value of freight exports increased by 55 percent between 2007 and 2012.
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… we spend less time commuting to work than people in most other regions.In 2014 the average commute was 26 minutes – about a minute longer than in 2010. The Portland region is tied for fifth-best metro area in the nation for the share of people with a 30-minute commute or better – nearly two-thirds of commuters in the region have a commute under a half-hour. In part that’s because people here don’t have to travel as far to get to work. The average commute distance in the region is just 7.1 miles.
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Having options is important because different ways of getting around have very different costs.
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