TERRE HAUTE — Despite the occasional wandering cow or deer darting across a county road, Cinda May drives 55 miles each weekday from Bloomfield to her job as chair of special collections at Cunningham Memorial Library on the campus of Indiana State University.
Between work and personal trips, she drives about 500 miles per week. It takes her about 1 hour and 20 minutes — one way — to complete the commute, which she has done since 2004.
“The challenge is if the weather is bad, because I drive mostly secondary state highways and county roads,” she said. “I have about six different ways that I can come. A lot of it depends on how much time I’ve got, what the weather is like and how I am feeling,” as far as a scenic drive goes.
She also drives a vehicle with a manual transmission, to help improve gas mileage.
“I own a house in Greene County and the real estate is not, shall I say, robust, and it is an old house, so it is hard to sell,” May said. “But even with gasoline prices as they are, it is still cheaper for me to live in Greene County than it is here [in Vigo County].”
May is among more than 12,000 people who commute from outside communities into Vigo County for work, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and STATSIndiana. It’s a number that has declined since 2006, when just fewer than 15,000 people traveled to Vigo County for employment.
As of 2012, there were 72,758 people who worked in Vigo County, and of those, 60,335 lived and worked here, according to STATSIndiana. About 17 percent of Vigo County’s workforce commuted from outside the county, while nationally, 27.4 percent of workers commuted outside the county in which they live.
The data show 3,091 people lived in Vigo County but worked elsewhere, a number that has been growing slightly for the past three years, according to STATSIndiana.
“There was a definite drop for those commuting into Vigo between 2006 and 2007, and that decline has continued, but slowed,” based on data from Indiana tax returns, said Carol Rogers, deputy director of the Indiana Business Research Center at Indiana University Kelley School of Business.
“At the same time, the number of people living in Vigo but commuting outside the county for work shrank significantly after 2008 (the year of a recession) and has increased slightly over the past several years,” Rogers said in an interview and in email responses.
While Vigo County remains “a job hub” for surrounding counties, between 2006 and 2013, there was a loss of nearly 2,000 jobs among private employers in the county, she said. “That certainly would contribute to the decline by 2,498 people commuting into Vigo County, that is, working in Vigo but living elsewhere,” Rogers said.
Figures for incoming commuters and residents driving to jobs somewhere else are not directly comparable, Rogers said, but “the loss of 2,000 jobs combined with about 2,000 folks not coming into the county tends to indicate that jobs were no longer available to them.”
“On the flip side, the recession took its toll on jobs offered in other counties to which Vigo residents typically commuted, including Marion County and Hendricks County. Note, however, that the number of Vigo residents going outside the county for work has begun an upward, albeit slight uptick over the past three years,” she said, adding that more jobs are opening up in other counties.
“Keep in mind that some people have moved out of the county — between 2012 and 2013 there was a negative net migration of minus 593. That is, more people left the county than moved into it. So migration has some impact on these numbers, too,” Rogers said.
Steve Witt, president of the Terre Haute Economic Development Corp., said he also thinks there may be more to commuting patterns than just employment, such as fuel prices and the desire of people to live in urban areas closer to work.
Retail gasoline prices in the Midwest in 2006 were about $2.55 per gallon at their highest, jumping to about $3.52 in 2013, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
“We work every day to try to bring new employment opportunities, such as the new Casey General Stores. And other companies have rebounded in a good way from the recession, such as ThyssenKrupp and Advics Manufacturing,” Witt said. Casey’s announced earlier this year it would locate a warehouse here, joining ThyssenKrupp and Advics in the Vigo County Industrial Park.
Witt is a commuter, himself, taking about 20 to 25 minutes to reach his Terre Haute office from his home in Sullivan County.
While the vast majority of workers who live in Vigo County also work in the county, about 7.4 percent were estimated to work outside the county and 0.4 percent worked outside the state, according to the U.S. Census 2012 American Community Survey.
In addition, the majority of Vigo County men and women — 87.5 percent— drive alone to work, according to that census survey, which showed only 6 percent of workers carpool. The census estimates 3.4 percent walk to work, while 1.5 percent of Vigo County workers use a taxi and just 0.2 percent use public transportation.
Only 0.7 percent of workers, the survey reported, pedaled to work on a bicycle, while 0.6 percent of Vigo County residents worked from home.
Travel time to work, for the majority of workers, ranges from 10 minutes to 24 minutes, with 19.2 minutes being the mean travel time to work in Vigo County, according to the U.S. Census.
For about one-fifth of workers, or 20.4 percent, travel time to work is less than 10 minutes. The breakdown in time spent on the road to work goes up from there: 21.7 percent take 10 to 14 minutes to travel to their jobs; 22.6 percent require 15 to 19 minutes to get there; and 16.2 percent drive 20 to 24 minutes to get to work.
Just 4.7 percent of workers commute one or more hours to their jobs, according to the U.S. Census.
Kim Richardson drives each weekday from Parke County to her job at the Vigo County Annex. Her commute takes about 30 to 40 minutes for the approximately 26-mile drive, but on the return, it takes 40 to 45 minutes, because of outbound traffic, she said.
“I grew up in Rockville and left for about 10 years and lived in Terre Haute, and I have been back in Rockville for about two years,” Richardson said.
She is among an estimated 10.6 percent of workers, according to the survey, who leave to go to work between 7 a.m. and 7:29 a.m. Another 17.1 percent leave their residences between 7:30 a.m. and 7:59 a.m., and an estimated 11.3 percent head to work between 6:30 a.m. and 6:59 a.m.
Dave Taylor, director of media relations at ISU, drives daily from Marshall, Ill. “I have been commuting back and forth to either Terre Haute or Sullivan since 1987,” he said.
Marshall is Taylor’s hometown. His commute to Terre Haute takes about 20 minutes “because I come from the west, where there are few traffic lights,” he said.
For about 20 years, Taylor commuted to Terre Haute for his work in radio, TV and newspaper. “Terre Haute is certainly the media hub for 15 counties in Indiana and Illinois,” he said.
Travella Myers commutes each weekday from Clay County to her job as environmental health supervisor for the Vigo County Health Department. She has been driving from Cory for the past 14 years.
Before that, she lived in Terre Haute but drove to Indianapolis, where she worked in the Marion County Health Department and for the Indiana Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Myers drives about 50 miles a day to and from work, and puts additional miles on a county-owned vehicle while on the job. She said she commutes because her family “chose to live in the country. But I grew up [near Medora] where commuting is the norm. My dad and mom either traveled to Bloomington or Columbus, and that was 45 to 50 minutes away.”
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