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New Haveners Hate Driving

Thursday, Nov 12, 2009 | Updated 1:00 PM EST

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Yeah, we love riding bikes in New Haven. But this we already knew.

Here's another feather New Haven can add to its cap: U.S. News ranked it in the top 15 cities for people who hate driving and long commutes. That's us!

Stepping away from their traditional ranking of schools, the mag took into consideration the average commuting time in metropolitan areas (24.4 minutes in 2009) and looked for those cities with even shorter times. Add to that the percentage of people who get to work without driving or carpooling (not including work-at-homers).

And voila!

The top 15 also include cities like Cambridge, Mass., Boulder, Co., and Honolulu!

New Haven's average commute time is 21.6 minutes and 27.3 percent are non-commuters.

The magazine credits the city's "unusual downtown" for its commuting patterns. Unlike cities like Hartford, which fills up with employees mid-day and then turns into a ghost town around 5:30 p.m., New Haven claims 7,000 people who live in the downtown area, making its population density greater than downtown Seattle, Chicago or Baltimore.

The other big trend in the list of 15 is that many are college towns, like Chapel Hill, N.C., Ames, Iowa, Syracuse, N.Y. and Ann Arbor, MI.

Read the whole thing here.