NYC Commute Times: Census Microdata on Resident Workers
Public-use microdata from the article “The hour-plus commute”
Not synthetic. Disclosure-protected survey records published by a government statistical agency, cut to the people or households we looked at.
- Records
- Public-use microdata
- Place
- New York City
- Version
- 1.13,
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0; code MIT
- Built for
- The hour-plus commute (version 1.13)
The hour-long commute in New York is a matter of address and vehicle far more than pay. A quarter of the city's commuters spend an hour or more each way, mostly subway and bus riders from the outer boroughs; about half the racial gap remains after adjusting for where people live, travel and work; the pattern has held since 1990, and nothing in the MTA's 2026 figures says the trip got quicker.
The article's own data file, microdata cut to what it analyses, and the script that computes every figure in it. Computed from: ACS 2020–2024 five-year PUMS, NYC resident workers, with the 2024 one-year file for the reproduction; Census 1990 and 2000 5% PUMS and ACS 2005–2024 one-year PUMS for the series; MTA daily ridership to 30 September 2026; MTA bus speeds and subway customer journey metrics to August 2026.
Files
| File | Rows | Size | What it holds |
|---|---|---|---|
| data.csv | 151,386 | 23.5 MB | The microdata the article's figures are computed from. |
| analysis.py | 56 KB | The script that computes every figure in the article (MIT). |
Columns
data.csv: The data (22 columns)
row_id, weight, borough, worked_from_home, mode, mode_group, one_way_minutes, hour_plus, ninety_plus, place_of_work, works_in_manhattan, own_earnings_2024, earnings_band, race_ethnicity, foreign_born, bachelors_or_higher, occupation_group, usual_hours, leaves_before_6am, departure_code, age, sex. The article and its script
define each one.
Sources
- U.S. Census Bureau — Travel Time to Work (B08303), Aggregate Travel Time to Work (B08013) and Means of Transportation to Work (B08301), New York city and United States (ACS 2024 1-year)
- U.S. Census Bureau — the same tables for New York city and its five counties (ACS 2020–2024 5-year)
- U.S. Census Bureau — ACS 2020–2024 5-Year PUMS and 2005–2024 1-Year PUMS (New York), person files with replicate weights
- U.S. Census Bureau — Census 2000 5-Percent Public Use Microdata Sample, New York
- U.S. Census Bureau — 1990 Census Public Use Microdata Sample A (5 percent), New York
- Metropolitan Transportation Authority — MTA Daily Ridership and Traffic: Beginning 2020 (data.ny.gov), retrieved 4 October 2026, counts to 30 September 2026
- Metropolitan Transportation Authority — MTA Daily Ridership Data: 2020–2025 (data.ny.gov)
- Metropolitan Transportation Authority — MTA Bus Speeds: Beginning 2015 (data.ny.gov), retrieved 25 September 2026, months to August 2026; 2019 onward on the method the MTA adopted in August 2025, earlier years withdrawn while they are recalculated
- Metropolitan Transportation Authority — MTA Subway Customer Journey-Focused Metrics: Beginning 2015 (data.ny.gov), retrieved 25 September 2026, months to August 2026; every line from 2017
- U.S. Census Bureau — American Community Survey news: 2026 updates, update of 6 August 2026
- Governor of New York — Governor Hochul Highlights Record-Breaking Year of Performance and Ridership for the MTA in 2025 (2 January 2026)
- Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA — Ridership Returns: Mapping Post-Congestion Pricing Ridership Trends (2026)
- Office of the NYC Comptroller — Behind Schedule: How New York City's Bus System Slow Rolls Riders (April 2025)
- Zhang, Xu, Talen, González and Li — Quantifying racial inequality in transit access across New York City, PNAS Nexus 5(5), May 2026
- PolitiFact — Does New York City have the longest commute times? (March 2024)
- U.S. Census Bureau — Cartographic Boundary File, 2020 Public Use Microdata Areas, New York, 1:500,000, GENZ2020 release; the 2020 PUMA definitions used by the ACS from the 2022 files, and on every record of the 2020-2024 five-year file
Licence and credit
The survey records are the publishing agency's, redistributed as published; the columns we derived are CC BY 4.0; the script is MIT. Public-use microdata are disclosure-protected records derived from survey responses, published by the issuing agency so that no respondent can be identified; synthetic records are generated by SparkyData and correspond to no real person, household or address. Neither may be used to identify anyone.
Credit it as:
SparkyData (2026). NYC Commute Times: Census Microdata on Resident Workers (version 1.13). Data CC BY 4.0.
https://sparkydata.dev/data/nyc-commute-times-census-microdataThe article gives the charts, the uncertainty of each comparison and a changelog. Corrections and questions: sparkytech.dev@gmail.com, or see corrections.