September 27, 1999 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)

Airfare dominates public transportation expenditures

In all four regions of the country, airfare accounted for half or more of consumer expenditures on public transportation in 1997. The West had the highest share allocated to air transportation--71 percent.

[Chart data—TXT]

Households in the South and Midwest also spent well over half of their public transportation budgets on airfare. In contrast, consumers in the Northeast allocated just 50 percent of their public transportation expenditures to air travel. Households in the Northeast devoted more of their public transportation budgets to mass transit than did households in the other regions, at 29 percent. In the rest of the country, the proportion going to mass transit was only 8 percent.

Midwesterners allocated more of their public transportation expenditures to ship travel than did consumers in the other three regions. Ten percent of these expenditures went to ship travel, compared to 7 percent in the West, 6 percent in the Northeast and 5 percent in the South.

These data are a product of the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey program. Additional information is available from "Issues in Labor Statistics: Expenditures on Public Transportation" (PDF 16K).