U.S. Census Bureau: 5.9% of Puerto Rico workers did so from home in 2022
The U.S. Census Bureau recently released a brief based on the 2022 American Community Survey (ACS), presenting the latest statistics on commuting behaviors in Puerto Rico and the mainland U.S. since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Titled “Commuting in the United States: 2022,” the brief examines changes in commuting since the pandemic using the 2022 ACS one-year data set and comparing it to data from 2019 and 2021.
“As in the remainder of the United States, commuting patterns have changed in Puerto Rico since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the brief notes.
“Unlike the 50 states and the District of Columbia, the share of workers who drove alone to work declined relatively little between 2019 and 2022. Public transportation commuters in Puerto Rico, in 2021 as well as 2022, made up about two-thirds of the 2019 share,” according to the report.
“Home-based workers roughly tripled as a share of all workers in Puerto Rico, from 2.4% in 2019 to 7.4% in 2021, before declining to 5.9% in 2022. Notably, the total number of workers in Puerto Rico increased by only about 20,000 between 2019 and 2021 but grew by nearly 70,000 between 2021 and 2022,” the brief notes.
The breakdown details shifts in the way people travel to work since the onset of the pandemic, along with several commuting methods, including means of transportation, travel times and time of departure from home.
Additionally, it states that in Puerto Rico, 82.7% of workers drove alone in 2022, a decrease of less than 2 percentage points from 84.3% in 2019.
“Public transportation commuting in the United States remained well below the 2019 share of 5% of workers at 3.1% in 2022. This represented an increase from the 2.5% of workers commuting by public transportation in 2021. In Puerto Rico, less than 1% of workers commuted by public transportation in 2021 and 2022, compared to 1.2% in 2019,” the brief adds.
According to the Census Bureau, the ACS is designed to provide “reliable and timely demographic, social, economic and housing data for the nation, states, congressional districts, counties, places, and other localities every year.”
It has an annual sample size of about 3.5 million addresses and includes both housing units and group quarters such as nursing homes and prisons.
The ACS is conducted in all counties in the U.S. and every municipality in Puerto Rico, where it is known as the Puerto Rico Community Survey.
