Almost as remarkable as the surge in transit commuters is the increase in the number of folks who walk to work — in fact, we rank first among the 100 cities for that. Nearly 54,000 Seattleites, or about 12% of workers, hoofed it to their job in 2018, up 3.5 percentage points since 2010. That rise is surely due to the fact that much of our housing development this decade has been located in densely populated areas, in or near major employment centers like South Lake Union.
Only three major cities have a higher percentage of walker commuters: Boston, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, in that order. New York City is a little behind us, at around 10% of workers.
Bike commuting rebounded in 2018, after a surprising decline a year earlier. Only 2.8% of workers who live in Seattle biked to work in 2017. I wrote about this last year, and noted that it could be a one-year fluke — and we had the wettest start to a year on record in 2017, which surely depressed the bike-commuting numbers. It looks now like it was indeed a fluke, because we bounced back up to 3.8% in 2018. One factor could be the introduction of electric bikes to the city’s dockless bike-share programs, which make biking up Seattle’s steep hills a whole lot easier.
Less than 30% of Seattle bike commuters were women in 2018, which is one of the biggest gender gaps among U.S. cities with significant numbers of bike commuters. In some other cities with a similarly high percentage of bike commuters, 40% or more are women: Washington, D.C., Minneapolis and New Orleans.
Nearly 8% of employed Seattle residents worked from home in 2018, up about 1 percentage point from the start of the decade.