For most Dallas County workers, the commute is a solo drive or none at all

In Dallas County, the people who skip the commute now far outnumber those who take a bus or train, walk or bike to work combined.

About 204,461 workers worked from home, according to Census Bureau survey estimates covering 2020 through 2024. Only 18,364 commuted by public transportation. That count includes DART bus and rail riders along with users of any other transit service in the county.

That puts home-based workers ahead of transit riders by 186,097. The gap matters to DART and to the employers deciding how much office space to keep.

Walking and biking are smaller still. About 20,228 workers walked to their jobs and 1,776 rode a bicycle. Walkers edged out transit riders on paper, but the difference is within the margin of error, so walking and transit are effectively tied.

None of it comes close to the car. Solo drivers numbered 893,939, or nearly 7 in 10 workers in the county.

Dallas County leans a bit more toward remote work than the rest of Texas. Its work-from-home share of 15.7% is above the statewide 14.4% and slightly above the U.S. figure of 15.1%.

Transit follows the same split. The county's 1.4% transit share beats Texas at 0.9% but sits well below the national 3.2%.

Older workers lean toward home

Remote work is not just a young professional's perk. Among the county's oldest age group of workers, 19.2% worked from home. That beats workers in their early and middle careers, at 17.2%, or just over 1 in 6.

Teenage workers live a different commute. Only 5.8% of them worked from home. They also walked to work at 4.1%, well above the countywide walking share of 1.5%.

Those differences matter to the debate over the transit map. In coverage of suburban moves to leave DART, the Texas Tribune reported a warning that people who rely on transit, including young people and elderly Texans, "will effectively not have access to those parts of the region" (texastribune.org).

DART ridership is still short of 2019

Ridership counts line up with the commute numbers. DART's rides from January to October remained below the same months of 2019, according to the latest Federal Transit Administration data (texastribune.org). Transportation experts have tied the national ridership slump partly to the rise of remote work, along with service cuts (texastribune.org).

Dallas accounts for most of the system's ridership, and ridership there is still below where it was just before the pandemic (texastribune.org). DART's own figures show weekend ridership growing while weekday service has flattened out (dartorgcmsblob.dart.org).

Money splits the core from the suburbs. Plano contributed far more in sales tax to DART in fiscal 2023 than it received in investment (texastribune.org). Dallas received more in services than it paid in, the report found (texastribune.org).

Plano, Irving, Farmers Branch and Highland Park planned May votes on whether to leave DART (texastribune.org), even as the region's population is expected to keep growing through 2050 (texastribune.org). For every transit commuter in Dallas County, many more neighbors now work from home. That is the commuter base DART and its member cities are dividing up.

About the data

We used the Census Bureau's American Community Survey estimates for 2020–2024 on how Dallas County workers usually got to work, overall and by age group, with Texas and U.S. figures as benchmarks. We compared counts across commute modes using the survey's margins of error; the gap between work-from-home and transit commuters is statistically significant, while the gap between walkers and transit riders is not.

• These are survey estimates with margins of error, and the 2020–2024 span blends pandemic-era years with more recent ones, so they don't capture a single year's commute.
• The public transportation figure counts all transit agencies and modes, so DART riders can't be separated from other transit users.
• The survey asks how people usually got to work, so it can't count hybrid workers' office days or non-commute transit trips such as weekend rides.

Worked from home: workers who reported they usually worked at home in the week before the survey, rather than commuting. Public transportation: bus, rail, light rail, streetcar and similar transit services.

Sources

• U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey: Means of Transportation to Work (ACS 5-year 2020–2024), latest period 2024; retrieved Oct. 16, 2026. Data
• U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey: Means of Transportation to Work by Age (ACS 5-year 2020–2024), latest period 2024; retrieved Oct. 16, 2026. Data