In 2018, for the first time, people who took public transportation to work in the U.S. had higher median earnings than those who drove themselves. But the highest-earning people in the “median earnings by means of transportation to work” statistics released by the Census Bureau last month were those who didn’t commute at all.
The earnings advantage of public transportation users is mainly just a reflection of where the buses, subways and commuter trains are. The New York, Chicago, Washington, San Francisco and Boston metropolitan areas together accounted for almost 63% of the Americans who took public transportation to work, and pay is higher in those metropolitan areas than in the U.S. as a whole.
