Measuring Commuting in the American Time Use Survey

Research into the relationships between commuting and other activities has been hampered by the lack of suitably comprehensive datasets. This paper identifies a possible source of detailed information for such studies, the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). This paper surveys approaches used by researchers to analyze commuting in the ATUS and outlines a method of measuring commuting in a clear and consistent way. This analysis details the advantages of this method over other approaches. Commuting measured in the ATUS using this methodology is shown to be consistent with commuting measures in other large, nationally representative studies. The proposed methodology makes possible a range of analyses exploiting the unique information in the ATUS.