Ever get the feeling that riding the bus is taking a bigger bite out of your paycheck than it used to? Well, that’s because it is.
In the mid-1970s, a worker in Seattle making the Federal minimum wage had to work for just over 10 minutes to make enough money to pay for their bus rides to and from work. Today, they’d have to work for over 40 minutes to cover their commute – or, at Washington State’s higher minimum wage, almost 35 minutes.
For low wage workers, the cost of riding public transit has effectively tripled in the past forty years!
You can find a PDF of this report, along with source data, here:
https://transitriders.org/pdf/Working_More_to_Ride_to_Work