Most metro Atlantans still drive alone to work, but more telecommute

Fed up with some of the world’s worst traffic, more metro Atlanta residents are working at home, a new analysis shows.

Fed up with some of the world’s worst traffic, more metro Atlanta residents are working at home, a new analysis shows.

Fed up with some of the world's worst traffic, more metro Atlanta residents are opting to work at home.

That's one takeaway from a recent analysis of commuting patterns by the Atlanta Regional Commission.

The regional planning organization analyzed a decade’s worth of census data on how residents of the 29-county metro Atlanta area (as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau) get to work. A few highlights:

*About three out of four metro Atlanta residents drove alone to work in 2017, unchanged from 2008.

*About 3.5 percent of workers took public transportation to their job – about the same as a decade earlier. But that's still more than 100,000 people a day. And the ARC's Paul Donsky, who wrote about the analysis, notes that number could increase in coming years as MARTA expands in Atlanta and other parts of the region consider expanding transit options.

*Telecommuting saw a noticeable bump. In 2008, about 5.7 percent of residents worked from home. By 2017, that had jumped to 7.3 percent – or an estimated 208,000 people. That’s a lot of vehicles that aren’t on the road.

*Relatively small numbers of people bike or walk to work, ride a motorcycle or use other means of travel.

You can read more of the ARC's analysis here.