In a large city like Montreal, public transit provides us with
options for getting to work or school and back home again. In
deciding to choose traffic jams over metro delays, or to pay for
parking rather than buy a monthly pass, you weigh the pros, cons
and costs of your options, and your mental calculations are more
complicated than they may appear at first glance. In a paper
recently published in The Journal of Transportation and Land
Use, Zachary Patterson, an assistant professor in Concordia
University's Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment,
discovered that decisions about where to live and how to get
from home to work happen simultaneously. What's more, your
commuting choices depend not only on cost and travel time, but
also on who you are and where you live. With the help of
colleagues at McGill University and Université Laval, Patterson
crunched the numbers to determine which Montrealers are most
likely to take public transit and which are more likely to
drive. Previous studies have show