Tidbit Tuesday | How do Philadelphians of different income brackets commute to work?

March 25, 2014 by motuphila215

On Tuesdays, the Mayor’s Office of Transportation & Utilities (MOTU) posts a map or graphic that tells a story about transportation or utilities in the City of Brotherly Love.

This week we took American Community Survey data (2008 – 2012 5-year estimate) and graphed how Philadelphians within different income brackets report getting to work. You can find this information on the US Census’ American FactFinder here.

Here at MOTU, we saw a few interesting patterns in the data. According to the data, those Philadelphians who get to work by driving alone appears to increase by income bracket until the top bracket, where it decreases by 4 percentage points. In addition, we see a decrease and increase in those who walk to work. From the data, it appears that those who make between $35K – $49.9K are the least likely to walk to work, while those who make below $15K/yr and above $75K/yr are the most likely to walk to work. What other patterns do you see?

In case you are curious, here is the distribution of salaries for Philadelphia’s working residents: