SAI: A Linked Longitudinal Study of Commuting Behavior

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering. The United States sits on the precipice of historic new investments in transportation infrastructure. These investments have the potential to remake the transportation system in a way that supports the American economy, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and promotes opportunities for all segments of society. This SAI project enables decision-makers in state and local governments to make informed choices about transportation investments by generating new evidence on how people change their commutes in response to changes in the physical infrastructure around them. Past research on commuting behavior typically observes people at only one point in time. That approach lends valuable insight, but also imposes severe limitations on the kinds of inferences that can be made about commuting behavior. This new project overcomes those limitations by drawing on data collected in the American Community Survey (ACS). The ACS is an annual survey of about 2 million households conducted by the US Census Bureau since 2005. Among other data, the ACS records where people live, where they work, what they earn, and how they get to work. Utilizing a secure data center to protect privacy, this project identifies and links the responses of individuals who happen to be surveyed in more than one year, creating a longitudinal data set. By observing the change in commuting behavior over a period long enough to observe changes in transportation infrastructure, the resulting data set overcomes the limitations of surveys that observe people at only one point in time. These new data are used to address four questions: 1) By how much can changes to the residential built environment reduce car commuting? 2) How does teleworking affect commuting distance? 3) How does teleworking affect wage growth? And 4) Who is leaving transit-rich areas, who is replacing them, and how do their commutes change? The data and analyses are made widely available through the network of 33 Federal Statistical Research Data Centers, enabling new directions for future research on a broad range of transportation, economic and social outcomes. This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences and the Directorate for Engineering. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.