Atlas · Greenville, South Carolina← all topics

Getting to work

How Greenville travels to work, by what means, and for how long.

Mean travel time

19 min

ACS 2020–24

Drove alone

74.4%

2019–23

Worked from home

13.7%

2019–23

Commute under 20 min

60%

2019–23

How people get there

The figures behind the chart
Share of workersValue
Drove alone74.4%
Carpooled5.5%
Worked from home13.7%
Walked3.3%
Public transit0.7%
Bicycle0.3%
Taxi, motorcycle, other2%
Means of transportation to work, for workers 16 and over. The survey records the mode used for the longest distance, so a bus ride that starts with a drive to a park-and-ride counts as transit, and a walk to the car does not count as walking.

2019–23 · B08301

How long it takes

The figures behind the chart
Share of commutersValue
Under 10 minutes19.2%
10–19 minutes40.8%
20–29 minutes20.3%
30–44 minutes11.4%
45–59 minutes4.4%
60 minutes or more3.8%
Door to door, one way, excluding people who work from home. Self-reported and rounded to the nearest five minutes by most respondents, which is why the distribution has a comb-like shape in the raw data.

2019–23 · B08303

What’s notable

74.4% of workers drive to work alone, 13.7% work from home, 0.7% take transit, 3.3% walk. That is the shape of nearly every mid-sized American city built after the war: the car is not the leading option, it is effectively the only one, and the alternatives round to noise.

60% of commuters are at work within twenty minutes, and only 8.3% travel forty-five minutes or more. Short commutes are the compensation for car dependence here - the traffic is unavoidable but it is brief.

One structural caveat: this counts where workers *live*, not where they work. Someone living in Greenville and commuting to a plant outside the county appears here; someone driving in from elsewhere does not. For a city that is a regional employment center, that makes the traffic on the ground heavier than these numbers imply.

These are estimates. Most figures here come from surveys of a sample, not a count of everyone, and different rows carry different vintages - each number shows its own rather than being averaged into a single date.

Data retrieved: July 28, 2026

What is the average commute in Greenville, SC?+

Mean travel time to work is 19 minutes one way, per the American Community Survey. That excludes people who work from home.

How many people take public transit in Greenville?+

0.7% of workers commute by public transit. That is a small enough share that the survey's margin of error is a meaningful fraction of the estimate, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a precise count.

How many people work from home?+

13.7% of workers - roughly 5,388 people. These are five-year estimates spanning the period when remote work expanded sharply, so a single recent year would likely read differently.

Does this count people who commute into the city?+

No. The survey asks residents where and how they travel to work, so it captures outbound commuters and misses inbound ones entirely. A city that employs more people than it houses will have more traffic than these figures suggest.