Last week, US News and World Report announced something that many of us knew already: Ann Arbor is a great town for people who want short commutes. Fifteen cities were profiled where the population was greater than 50,000 people and where the commute times were less than the national average of 24.4 minutes. Ann Arbor came out fifth on the list for percentage of non-car commuters, at 27.5%. Cambridge MA had the highest percentage of non-car commuters at 58%, while both Ann Arbor and Boulder CO had the shortest commute times, at 18.4 minutes.

This acknowledgment that commute times are short is important to note. Who doesn’t want to live in a city where they have to spend less time getting to and home from work? The statistics on how people commute to work are significant as well. getDowntown conducted a survey with Survey Sciences Group this year and downtown employers and employees were polled about their commuting habits.

The majority of respondents, 24.7%, stating they commuted between .5 and 2 miles one way to work. This survey also found that 38.6% of downtown commuters use a sustainable option (bike, walk, carpool, bus, etc) to get to work each day. That is considerably higher than the 27.5% noted in the article. This disparity between our survey and the one noted in the US News and World Report article makes sense: they focused on the entire city, while this survey focused on the downtown. So many  people who work downtown also choose to live close to downtown.

It was also interesting to note that 13 out of the 15 cities listed had a northern climate. Waiting at the bus stop, biking or just walking to work might seem uncomfortable in the cold weather but a considerable amount of Americans in other cities with climates like ours do it too. Keep this in mind as you wait for the bus – the one you didn’t have to scrape the windshield of, warm up or dig out of a snow drift – this winter.

This leads to the question: did you make a choice about where you chose to live because of your commute to work?