If you’re covering the transportation beat, the plight of the poor super-commuter is a reliably evergreen story.

Profile some poor person who gets up at 4:00 AM to travel two hours and forty or fifty miles to a distant job, struggling to make ends meet between paying the rent and the high cost of transportation, with the added insult of having little free time to spend with their friends and family. Too often, the implication seems to be if we just had enough freeway capacity, these folks could whisk themselves to work in a fraction of the time.

For all the ink (pixels?) they command in the media, you’d think super-commuters would be a large fraction of Americans. But their numbers are actually extremely small. Data from the Census suggests that only about 3 percent of all commuters travel more than 90 minutes one-way to their daily workplace. A couple of years ago, I looked at the data and concluded that super-commuting was a non-growing non-significant non-problem.

A look at more recent data from the 2017 American Community Survey prompts us to revise that judgement…slightly. Super-commuting is still a trivially small share of all commuting, and for reasons we’ll discuss momentarily it is still mostly a non-problem (insofar as our transportation system is concerned). But in the past few years, there has been an uptick in long duration commutes.

Super commuting is up–because gas prices are down

Here’s what the data shows.

While super-commuting was essentially flat for several years after 2009—even as the economy was growing robustly—the number of commuters traveling 90 minutes or more started increasing in 2014. After growing less than one percent per year through 2014, from 2014 through 2017, super-commuting increased about 3.7 percent annually.