I think that's inflated. Many will say they depend on it without even having tried the local public transport, if available.
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It's greatly inflated by virtue of doing it by county instead, mingling major transit routes with fully rural areas.
But even that aside I strongly agree. Cook county would be under 50 if people were more willing to take the train
Haha, greatest country in the world my arse!
There are a lot of reason why we're not, but excessive car use is one of the lesser reasons!
Four out of the top nine counties are in NYC. Once again a common W for Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx (not you Staten Island, you suck)
Staten Island doesn't have the subway infrastructure that other boroughs have. The one line it does have does have relatively high usage. Maybe it's wise to expand it?
Im not saying Staten Island cant be good, there simply isn't the political will to improve anything. If their government and people got the heads out of the sand they would notice that there is demand for more rail infrastructure. Kinda like how there's significant amounts of unmet rail demand in Queens and Brooklyn (hopefully the IBX helps the issue)
Staten’s a bunch of republicans. They aren’t gonna pay for anything that lets the rabble in.
Viridis always brings peace to the soul
Are there maps like this for other part of the world? I'd imagine Europe has a much lower rate of car commuting.
In comparison to the US yeah probably but still overall pretty high would be my assumption.
I found this picture showing the whole world.

That is an abomination of data vis, good god
Yes it takes some time to decode, but it has lots of info.
It would be nice to somehow compare distances, time and population density as well.
Americans drive a lot, but they don't actually drive very far for work, whereas in Europe it's rather common to work in a different city than where you live. Asia has the highest population density and this benefits them both in finding local work and building public transport.
Yeah, I'm in the US Northeast. My commute is only 20 minutes and is 95% on the highway/motorway between cities here. This goes for pretty much everyone here with an office job. it just varies of course how far away you have to drive to get on/off.
We mostly do it in the same direction (toward the biggest city in the morning and back to the 'burbs in the evening) and most of us do this at roughly the same time each day.
If only there were a way to link our cars up together? Maybe even make them bigger to accommodate more passengers and share costs? Oh and we could put them on some sort of low-friction guided track!
.... hey, wait a second!
What’s going on in that one area in Montana?
Those two counties are Petroleum County, with a population of about 500, and Garfield County with a population of about 1,100. Both counties have a single town with about a quarter of the population.
This means a majority of the population live in the country, and likely work the lands they live on. This means no commute to work, which is what was measured.
This is a flaw in the methodology. Rurual Montana is not a bastion of urban planning. It is a mistake to look at travel to work exclusively. People need to travel to many destinations. And those living in those two counties probably use cars for everything else.
I wouldnt say it is a flaw, really. The data in general is a good approximation of auto dependence. And any researcher who isn't an idiot will see the same thing you did and simply discard the data in these counties as obvious outliers. Sure, we can imagine a more accurate metric for measuring auto dependency for the purposes of creating a very nice map for public consumption. But it your purpose is simply to conduct some statistical analysis, I don't think this dataset is bad - or at least not a bad start.
It's only bad if misinterpreted.
What the hell, Garfield county is about the quarter size of my country (the Netherlands, but only has 0,007% of the population. That's mind boggling to me
I'm wondering that too. Just a guess, low population density with lots of farmers 'working from home' since they live on their farm.
What’s going on in that one area in Montana?
Nothing.
I drove though there once. Hours of seeing nothing but road.
They don''t go to work. Farmers don't travel for work but it's likely low survey response. Very low population density there(1-10/mi)
You aren't getting anywhere in Montana without a car
I mean that's not really true. Most of the larger towns do have a bus system.
The only town I saw in that area in my 5 second search is Jordan, with a population of ~~357~~ 356.
Edit: corrected population, my bad
low population density means high variance in stats.
always expect the highest and lowest stats to come from those areas.
But it’s probably farmers who live on their farm or something.
Horses, atvs.
Conclusion: the Gulf Coast makes Americans crave cars.
The lack of sufficient population density to support public transit makes Americans crave cars. Population density is low because the US has the space, and the areas that are dense are stupidly expensive.
I'd love to take a bus or light rail to work, but instead I end up having a saily commuteof over 100 miles round trip. In the city where I work, a 600sft studio apartment would cost an extra 30 grand a year versus my 3 bed, 2 bath place 50-ish miles away.
A living nightmare
What is supposed to be surprising about this?
Everywhere I have lived, and everyone I have ever met had to take a car.
There are like maybe 15 places in the US with a functioning public transportation system.
Jobs are downtown but nobody make enough money to live downtown. Last time I tried it would have been > 75% my wages in rent only just to live in shit hole. I literally would not be able to feed myself.
The map actually does a good job of highlighting how population dense places exist without a lot of cars per person. New York and San Francisco are both shown and have green or yellow patches. Mass transit works so damn good but, like election maps, the actual region highlighted is empty space with a few people all doing the same things.
I've lived in some of the counties in the south under 100% reliance and let me assure you outside of the major cities many are only under 100% due to crippling poverty. I can't tell you how many people I've know in my life thay have had to walk 2 hrs one way to a shitty low paying job at a gas station or dollar general.
Swear to god, every heat map of the US highlights how much of a shit hole the Mississippi delta must be.
Yeah, this is one of the reasons why I only want to live in the NYC area of the US. Just take the train or bus, don't worry about it.
America is essentially a third world country with just a handful of developed metropolitan areas
And those few developed areas havnt meaningfully evolved or improved in decades and especially compared to the infrastructure developments seen in asia or Europe