Just 1.3% of Orange County workers ride public transit to their jobs

On a weekday morning in Orange County, the usual commute is a car on Interstate 4 or a busy suburban road, not a seat on a LYNX bus or a SunRail train.

Just 1.3% of Orange County workers got to work by public transportation, according to Census Bureau estimates covering 2020 through 2024. Nationwide, the share was 3.2%.

That works out to about 9,939 transit commuters in a county where 68.1% of workers commute alone by car. Another 17.7% worked from home, and 9.1% carpooled.

The figures come from the American Community Survey's newest multiyear release. It is the first such set with no years before 2020 in it, so it no longer mixes in whole years of commuting from before the pandemic.

How Orange County gets to work

Commuting alone by car is the norm. At 68.1%, solo car commuters outnumber workers using every other way of getting to work combined.

Working from home has become a major part of the picture. At 17.7%, the at-home share is larger than the carpool and transit shares added together.

Compared with the nation, the county's mix tilts away from transit. The U.S. transit share of 3.2% is well above Orange County's 1.3%. Orange's work-from-home share of 17.7%, meanwhile, tops the national 15.1%.

How it stacks up

Statewide, the transit picture looks much the same. Florida's transit share is 1.2%, close to Orange County's. The state's work-from-home share is 15.7%, below Orange's.

The Chronicle compared Orange County with the main counties of Sun Belt metros of similar size: Tampa, Charlotte, Austin, San Antonio and Las Vegas. Orange ranks 5th among them for transit commuting, with the top rank going to the highest share.

Clark County, home to Las Vegas, has a transit share of 2.2%, ahead of Orange by 0.9 percentage points. That gap is statistically significant, meaning it is very unlikely to be a quirk of who happened to answer the survey.

Only Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, posted a lower transit share than Orange, at 0.8%. That gap was not formally tested, so it should be read with care.

On working from home, Orange County lands in the middle of the group, ranking 4th. Travis County, home to Austin, is far ahead: 30.2% of its workers worked from home, 12.5 percentage points higher than Orange's share. That difference is also statistically significant.

Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte, and Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, round out the comparison. Their shares appear in the chart above.

What riders find, and what to watch

The survey does not say why so few Orange County workers ride transit. It asks how people got to work, not about bus schedules, routes or trip times. What is known is how the region's main systems run.

LYNX connects Orange, Osceola and parts of Seminole counties through local bus routes (golynx.com). Bus frequency varies by route, with some lines running every hour (Wikipedia).

All LYNX routes run Monday through Friday, but weekend and holiday service varies by route (Wikipedia). The agency also offers weekday bus connections to SunRail (golynx.com).

SunRail curtailed late-night train service on Dec. 21, 2015, citing ridership (Wikipedia). Its budgeted operating costs have far exceeded what riders pay in fares, leaving an operating deficit (Wikipedia).

The census survey counts workers and how they usually got to work, not total rides. That means its figures can't be compared directly with transit ridership counts, which include trips of every kind.

For the roughly 9,939 Orange County workers who commute by transit, those schedules shape the workday. For everyone else, the numbers describe a county where getting to work mostly means a solo car trip.

The Census Bureau's next multiyear release will add 2025 and drop 2020, the year the pandemic began. Watch whether Orange County's work-from-home share holds near 17.7%, and whether its transit share edges toward the nation's 3.2% or stays close to Florida's 1.2%.

How we did this

We used the Census Bureau's American Community Survey estimates for 2020 through 2024 to compare how workers commute in Orange County, Florida, the U.S. and the principal counties of the Tampa, Charlotte, Austin, San Antonio and Las Vegas metros. We ranked the counties on transit and work-from-home shares and tested the key gaps for statistical significance using the survey's margins of error; the Austin work-from-home comparison produced a 23.7 z-score and the Las Vegas transit comparison a 6.4 z-score, both well past the cutoff for significance.

Public transportation share: the percentage of workers who said they usually got to work by bus, train or other transit, based on the way they traveled the longest distance. Worked from home: workers who said they usually worked at home rather than commuting. Commuted alone by car: workers who usually went to work by themselves in a car, truck or van. Carpooled: workers who usually shared a ride to work in a car, truck or van. Percentage point: the simple difference between percentages, for example the gap between Travis County's and Orange County's work-from-home shares. Statistically significant: a difference large enough that it is very unlikely to come from chance in who answered the survey.

Limitations

• These are survey estimates, not a full count. Each figure has a margin of error, so small gaps between places may not be real differences.
• Only the Austin work-from-home gap and the Las Vegas transit gap were formally tested. Other comparisons, such as Orange County versus Florida or Hillsborough County on transit, may fall within the margin of error.
• The figures average several years together, starting in 2020, when the pandemic upended commuting. They show the period as a whole, not how things stand today.
• Public transportation in the survey covers all transit, such as buses and trains, not just LYNX.
• The data shows how people get to work, not why. It cannot tell us whether bus schedules, job locations or other factors explain the low transit share.
• The comparison uses each metro's main county, not the entire metro area.

Sources

• U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey: Means of Transportation to Work (ACS 5-year 2020–2024), latest period 2024; retrieved Oct. 14, 2026. Data