This is the first in what will be an occasional series where I dig into common claims people make about Kansas City’s built environment.
The Claim
When I criticize the excesses of Kansas City’s freeway network—a hobby of mine over on Twitter—I consistently get the same pushback from commenters who aren’t ready to fully jump on the urbanist bandwagon: sure the loop is a mess, they say, and the construction of the freeway system destroyed Kansas City’s emerging identity as one of America’s best planned cities, but at least it’s a useful system. For all the mistakes we may have made building it, the result is a network that keeps congestion low and commute times short. And those benefits matter far more to the average person than any aesthetic preference for distinctive urban design.
Are they right? Do we have particularly short commutes, short enough that I might begrudgingly admit our midcentury planners were onto something when they sliced this place apart with overpasses and on-ramps?
The Finding
The answer is pretty clearly yes. Kansas City is tied for the shortest average commute time of any Urban Area with at least one million residents in the U.S.
Analysis
Among Urban Areas with at least one million residents, Kansas City is tied with Milwaukee for the shortest average commute time in the country. Its 22.2 minute average is 18% shorter than the US overall and 38% shorter than the longest, New York’s. The three closest UAs are all substantially smaller than KC, too—it’s not until you get to Minneapolis (40th) and then St Louis (35th) that you find larger. We’ve managed to keep commutes short as we’ve grown to a relatively large size.
It would therefore appear that below some population threshold a built environment like Kansas City’s — near-uniform suburban densities, weak polycentricity, and a thick network of freeways — is ideally suited for getting people to jobs quickly.
The linked posts here give a flavor of this urban geometry.
The distribution of commute times is worth considering, too. Commute time inequalities manifest in various ways: some cities have wealthy cores with short commutes and poor suburbs with longer commutes; others have a segregated zone where workers commute long distances; and some have a patchwork of long-commute areas produced by several different forces, including low-cost housing at the metropolitan fringe, concentrated employment centers, transit dependence, and affluent exurban growth.
Kansas City commutes are reasonably uniform, with a long but thin right tail. A tiny share of our residents commute more than half an hour, and the majority commute 21 minutes or less (the tail drags the average up). We don’t appear to have any of the patterns described above, at least not at scale.
You can visualize the distribution geographically on the following map.
The favored quarter generally has the shortest commutes, and more isolated pockets like Independence and Riverside are somewhat longer. There’s some correlation between freeway access and commute times, but it’s weak—for example, there are a few long-commute tracts within a mile of the downtown freeway loop, and the large rectangular block of neighborhoods between I-35 and US-71 in northern OP and KC proper has some of the shortest commutes. There’s no clear pattern of disparity of any kind.
The next map checks this by looking at the tracts with the shortest and longest commutes. They’re randomly scattered.
Here’s the data sliced by jurisdiction. Suburban Jackson County comes out looking worst and Johnson County best (another W for the favored quarter). KC proper is right near the average.
There’s no convincing patterns of socioeconomic disparity visible in a simple review of the data. The following charts regress commute times by tract against tract median income and racial group shares. None has any statistical significance.
To give you a sense of how these short commutes happen, here’s a chart showing commute mode in the UA. <2% of commute trips are done by transit, walking, or biking. I’m a very satisfied member of that 2%, though I’ll acknowledge my work/home trail connection is mostly a happy accident, and not common. The vast majority of Kansas Citians drive, either alone or with someone else. 16% usually work remotely.
But!
Writing this post has basically convinced me that our freeway network creates short commutes. But of course that’s too simple a correlation, and a myriad of other factors no doubt contribute—geography, political economy, idiosyncratic historical events, etc.
This also isn’t a real cost/benefit exericse. The cost of this network is real, and significant. Even knowing we would have the shortest commutes I would not have designed the city this way. There are substantial social, economic, and environmental costs to our large freeway network.1
And to go back to my disparities analysis, commute times are not the only transportation-related issue for poor and minority communities in the United States. This data misses inter-tract variability and can’t speak to the cost burden and access issues that a car-dependent built environment places on poor households.
Close
It’s somewhat surprising to me that I’ve never heard local boosters tout the fact we have such short commutes. “Shortest average commute of any big city in the country” is a factoid you’d think KCADC, the Chamber, local columnists, politicians and sports broadcasters would all love to yap about. But perhaps because the Urban Area—while superior to all other city definitions—is a bit obscure, and this only holds with a constrained set of big cities 1mil+, no one seems to have put this together before.2 If you are one of these people and you would like to start talking about this, feel free to credit my blog for it.3
The freeway enjoyers are right, at least on the narrow question posed here. Kansas City has built a transportation system that moves workers to jobs quickly, with relatively little variation across neighborhoods. Urbanists should acknowledge this rather than pretending the system is merely wasteful or dysfunctional. The harder question, of course, is whether shaving several minutes from the average commute justified the land consumption, neighborhood destruction, infrastructure burden, and automobile dependence required to achieve it. The data here cannot answer that question but they clarify at least one element of the tradeoff.
Still. Land of the short commutes. That’s a pretty good thing to be.
Just how large the freeway system is here will be the subject of my next fact check post
If you do the analysis by MSA with 1mil+ pop, we land 50 of 56 (the five below it are all at least 1/3rd smaller, though)
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I’ve been saying KC has a great freeway system since I moved here. I quickly noticed how extensive it was and looked up how many freeway miles per capita we have. Number one in the world. And like driving.
I’ve lived in cities and military postings where I was dependent on mass transit. When the system works well and the culture has strong taboos against being disruptive (Japan), it works fine, but I prefer a car based system. Particular communities would be better off if they had planned to be more walkable, but overall, I prefer what we have.
Multi-modal transit is very popular right now, particularly online, and I’m not surprised so few people say anything positive about our system, but the MMT mavens are getting lots of pushback from NIMBYs and others in their communities, so I think there are quite a few people who quietly prefer it. It deserves a better case, thanks for contributing to it.
"You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." Kansas City residents often take those short commutes for granted and focus on those costs to complain about, but then if you move away you realize how bad it is everywhere else, and you wish every day with misty-eyed nostalgia to get your KC experience back.