Getting to Work in New England: Commuting Patterns across the Region

Commuting is nearly ubiquitous across New England. Employers in cities and towns large and small depend on workers who commute from communities near and far. Communities, in turn, rely on employers located in cities and towns scattered in every direction to provide jobs for their residents. Workers may choose to live in a city other than where they work for a host of reasons, including housing and transportation options, school preferences, and work locations of a partner or spouse. This Regional Brief analyzes data on current commuting patterns, using 2022 New England data primarily. While the COVID-19 pandemic created a substantial disruption to commuting behavior, the spatial relationships between home and work addresses that we observe in 2022 are remarkably similar to those of 2019, suggesting that the patterns described for New England in this brief are fairly stable over the short term and that effects of hybrid and remote work arrangements on the region’s workplace–residence landscape are subtle. Recent research also indicates existing “flexible work” arrangements are overwhelmingly hybrid, requiring considerable “on-site” presence, and that fully remote work arrangements have grown increasingly rare since the height of the pandemic, accounting for less than 12 percent of workers employed by firms as of 2022 (Barrero, Bloom, and Davis 2023).