The pandemic is credited with (or blamed for) the acceleration of a number of trends, among them an increase in telecommuting. The recent release of  2021 American Community Survey (ACS) 1-year data allow us to take a closer look at this phenomenon for the Atlanta metro area.

As this graph in Figure 1 below shows, the percentage of workers working from home slowly increased over the 2010s– about three percentage points over the course of that last decade. But that number almost tripled for 2021, to nearly one-quarter of all workers[1] . It remains to be seen exactly how much of that increase will persist as we emerge from the pandemic, but it is clear from the overall trajectory that telecommuting will be here to stay for significant numbers of workers.

Figure 2 below compares both the Atlanta MSA and Georgia as a whole to ten of the eleven Atlanta Regional Commission member counties [2] . Fulton and Forsyth counties are the leaders in telecommuting with over 1/3 of workers, while Henry and Clayton Counties have the highest percentages of traditional commuters.

So, has this increase in telecommuting in the Atlanta MSA had any impact on the nature of traditional commutes? In a word, yes. The following Figure 3, which focuses only on those workers who work away from home, shows that commute lengths had been trending up over the 2010s– a bit more than two minutes, or 7% longer, on average.  For while the MSA added about 88,000 telecommuters over the decade, the number of traditional commuters swelled by almost 127,000. And more commuters means more congestion. In 2021, however, the average commute length dropped to a level below that of the early 2010s– a decrease of about 9% between 2019 and 2021.

The final chart (Figure 4 below) compares average travel time for commuters by county for 2019 vs. 2021. We see that the greatest time savings accrued to commuters from Fayette (5¼ minutes or 16%) and Cherokee (5 minutes or 15%).

[1] Note that the pandemic interrupted ACS data collection for most of 2020, so there is no data release for that year.
[2] Due to issues related to sample sizes, the Census Bureau releases 1-year ACS data only for municipalities with at least 65,000 population (only 39 of Georgia’s 159 counties meet this threshold) and some data tables are suppressed in many cases even among those meeting that minimum. We therefore can’t show data for Rockdale County here.