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WESTON, Conn. – People in the Weston, Easton and Redding area and across Fairfield County have some of the longest commutes in the country, according to a report released by the U.S. Census Bureau recently.
The study focused on the number of “mega-commuters,” or those who travel more than 90 minutes and 50 miles one-way to get to work each day. More than 586,000, or 0.8 percent of American commuters met those criteria, the bureau says.
The average commute nationwide was about 25.5 minutes, the report said.
The Fairfield County-to-Manhattan trip was listed as the fourth-worst “mega-commuter flow” in the country, or a common trip with a high percentage of mega-commuters. On average the commute from Fairfield County to New York County took 104.2 minutes and spanned 60.4 miles.
Even those who worked within Fairfield County were in for long commutes. About 2.6 percent of the people whose jobs were in the Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk metropolitan area qualified as mega-commuters, according to the Census Bureau.
The study also found that mega-commuters were more likely to take public transportation or carpool. Overall about 81 percent of Americans drive to work alone, while 9.5 percent carpool and 5 percent use public transportation. Only about 68 percent of mega-commuters drive alone, with 14.3 percent carpooling and 11.3 using public transportation.
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Comments (1)
I take the Cannondale train into NYC and door to door my commute is a little under two hours. I've found I can save a good amount of time by driving down to South Norwalk and catching the train there, but then I have to pay for parking. I guess it's the price we pay to have some space around us!