By Anthony Flint, Globe Staff and Bill Dedman, Globe Correspondent, 05/22/2002

ore Massachusetts residents drove alone to work in the 1990s, fewer people used carpools, and use of transit barely changed -- increasing the average daily roundtrip from roughly 45 minutes per day to nearly an hour, according to US Census data released yesterday.

The typical Massachusetts commuter spends a total of nine days per year getting to work, mostly behind the wheel of a car. Statewide commuting time is among the worst in the nation, just behind Illinois and California, based on Census data that has been released on 21 states to date.

The increasing reliance on cars can be traced to low gas prices and an economic boom that encouraged people to live in distant suburbs where traditional commuter rail is not available, researchers analyzing the data said. The spread-out development pattern has flooded the roadways with solo drivers, said Edmund Tarallo, deputy director of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.

"People continued to move further out, and the congestion is increasing drive times," Tarallo said. "Even in places like Waltham, with lower commuting times, the time it takes to get to work has increased since 1990."

South Shore towns reported some of the longest commuting times -- 42 minutes each way from Plympton, 39 minutes from Duxbury and Hull, and 37 minutes from Marshfield. And boomtowns all along Interstate 495 saw spikes in commuting time; the average commute from Hopkinton increased by 32 percent over the decade to 33.5 minutes one-way.

Many residents in high-growth areas of the state commute to jobs in Boston, but cannot easily get to commuter rail. But an increasing number are believed to be making a suburb-to-suburb commute that is generally only possible by car -- from Hopkinton to Burlington or other office-park centers along Route 128, for example.

At the other extreme, the shortest daily commutes in the state, were in tiny Gosnold, on the island of Nantucket and in Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod where more people can stop for coffee and still make it to work in under 15 minutes.

But the average commute for Massachusetts was anything but leisurely: an increase in the one-way commuting time from just over 22 minutes to 27 minutes from 1990 to 2000, according to the Census data. Massachusetts led New England states in overall commuting time, according to the new Census data. New Hampshire's one-way commute was reported as 25.3, followed by Connecticut with 24.4, Maine with 22.7, Rhode Island's 22.5 and Vermont with 22.6.

Driving alone was overwhelmingly the transportation of choice in Massachusetts and all the other New England states, reflecting a steady increase in solo driving since 1980. The number of people who said they drove alone to work is up from 72 percent statewide in 1990 to 74 percent in 2000.

Carpooling, a favored policy of the 1980s and 90s, declined from 10 percent to 9 percent of all commuters. The use of transit, meanwhile, inched up from 8 to 8.7 percent -- despite an estimated $1.6 billion spent on commuter rail improvements over the '90s.

That doesn't mean commuter rail is a failure, said Tarallo, from MAPC, a regional planning group. Generally people need to reach a "tipping point," where their daily roundtrip commute by car reaches 90 minutes or so, and then they will give up on driving and use the train, Tarallo said.

Despite calls for increased "reverse commute" and suburb-to-suburb transit service, sprawling development patterns are making it impossible for people to reach their workplace using public transit, said Robert Puentes, senior research manager at the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution.

"The No. 1 trend we're seeing is the `edgeless city' development -- places that are not even as dense as Tyson's Corner (in northern Virginia), but office parks concentrated around exit ramps and further out on the suburban fringe, where there is very little opportunity to run transit efficiently," he said.

The decentralization of metropolitan areas is fueled by antiquated zoning laws that separate homes and workplaces, Puentes said. Some cities including Arlington, Va., and San Francisco are encouraging development near transit stations in the suburbs, so driving a car is not the only commuting option, he said.