Study: Recession changes Atlanta driving habits

By Ariel Hart

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In a new study of 10 urban areas, Atlantans changed their commutes more than any other city’s residents in response to the recession.

According to the study commissioned by IBM, the economic downturn caused 27.1 percent of Atlantans to change how they get to work in one way or anther. Much of that had to do with people working from home more.

“As businesses went through and had to take staff reductions, you had more people either not commuting, or starting small businesses and working from home,” guessed Raul Arce, a vice president for travel and transportation at IBM who lives in the Atlanta area. In addition, he said, gas prices remained something of a concern, and more residential areas are getting Internet coverage.

Atlantans also were the least likely of all to say that traffic had negatively affected their health by making them angry – 19 percent of respondents here said that. Miami ranked highest on that score, with 27.3 percent.

The main idea of the study was to measure the overall “commuter pain” of each region. That’s a combination of factors from the emotional and economic toll of commuting in that area. In its similar study last year, IBM ranked Atlanta 2nd. This year, Atlanta came in behind Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Miami, Chicago and Boston. It tied with New York.

IBM surveyed 4,446 adult drivers in 10 U.S. cities in August 2009, according to the study. It looked at work performance, gas prices, sleep deprivation, stress, anger and other issues.

IBM’s study comes from an Internet poll, and some traditionalists don’t like those. In traditional polls, a key element of accuracy is that pollsters seek out a random list of people in an area to ask them questions, an expensive process. But officials at IBM, which sells computerized products to ease traffic, say their Internet poll is accurate and it weights the responses to match the makeup of the general population.