Why the second-biggest bill in your household budget is the affordability lever our local governments can actually pull
Streets for People | Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown | Chris Hamilton | May 2, 2026
Everyone’s talking about affordability. Your groceries. Your car insurance. The gas pump on Truman Avenue at $4.79 a gallon. The rent that just went up again. The cost of a sandwich at a place that used to be a $9 sandwich. The cost of actually living here. National polls heading into the 2026 elections show cost of living as the top voter concern by a mile — across parties, across age groups, across regions. It was the issue that decided 2024, and it’s already shaping 2026.
Here at home, the same conversation is everywhere. Hometown! Key West, the Key West Chamber and others will start running its candidate forums in the months ahead, and every candidate — for mayor, for the three open City Commission seats, for the two County Commission seats on the August ballot — is going to say some version of the same thing. Keep Key West affordable. Support working families. Protect our workforce. They’re right to. In Key West, the average apartment rent now runs about $2,548 a month — 56% above the national average. The average wage-earner can’t afford the average rent. That’s why the word affordable is on every campaign website.
But there’s a piece of the affordability conversation that almost never gets its own microphone — and it shows up in plain numbers. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American household spends $1,110 a month on transportation. That’s $13,318 a year. That’s the second-biggest household expense in the country, right after housing. Together, housing and transportation eat up more than half of what the typical family spends in a year. And in Key West and the Florida Keys that percentage is even higher – and we’ll get to that in a moment.
Here’s the part worth sitting with. Unlike housing — most of the price tag of which is driven by forces no commissioner can easily control — transportation costs are something local government can actually move the needle on. This summer. In the FY27 budget. With decisions the people we’re about to elect will vote on in their first year. In our story below let’s look at the affordability math equation, how public transit and bikes fit in, and how the City of Key West and Monroe County can address the problem this summer. We even have some questions you can ask the candidates. Let’s dive in…
The Real Affordability Math
Start with the national picture. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2024 Consumer Expenditure Survey, released last December, lays it out cleanly. The average U.S. household spends $26,266 a year on housing — about a third of total spending. Transportation runs $13,318 — another 17%. Together that’s more than half the household budget, gone before you’ve paid for groceries (12.9%), child care, or health insurance. The transportation share has been climbing fast: insurance costs alone are up roughly 25% in the past three years.
AAA’s 2025 Your Driving Costs study puts the average annual cost of owning and operating a new vehicle at $11,577 — about $965 a month. Two adults each with a car — close to the average household in both Key West (1.7 cars) and Monroe County (1.9) easily run $20,000 a year in transportation costs before they think about rent.
And before anyone says but my car is paid off — about half of all U.S. drivers own their car outright — that doesn’t get you off the hook. Bankrate’s hidden-cost-of-ownership study puts the cost of running a paid-off car at roughly $7,000 a year — about $580 a month. That’s gas, insurance, maintenance, registration, depreciation, and the thousand dollars you weren’t planning to spend on new tires. In the Florida Keys, where insurance and gas push higher, that number climbs further.
Florida insurance is among the worst in the nation — full coverage averages roughly 60% above the national average, putting Florida third highest in the country depending on which study you read. Monroe County, in turn, has consistently posted the highest gas prices in Florida. I photographed Truman Avenue a couple weeks ago with the price per gallon at $4.79. The price hasn’t budged. And while it can be slightly cheaper up the Keys, when our households spend even just the national average on transportation, we’re underspending the local reality.
The Center for Neighborhood Technology has been doing this math for over a decade in their Housing+Transportation Index, which combines both bills into one number to measure true affordability. The national average is around 50%. Key West runs 56%. Monroe County runs 58%. 56 and 58 percent! Both well above the line that affordability planners use to flag a place as cost-burdened.
Look closer at the numbers and the picture sharpens. The CNT model puts Key West’s typical household at 1.7 cars and $13,596 a year in transportation costs. In Monroe County, the same model — same income assumption — shows 1.9 cars and $15,209 in annual transportation costs. The County household drives nearly 22,000 miles a year, compared to 17,000 in the City. CNT scores Monroe and Key West both as “car-dependent with limited access to public transportation” – more on that below. Meaning there are no location efficient neighborhoods in Key West or the Florida Keys that reach the threshold where transportation costs are low enough to genuinely offset housing costs.
Rent-only affordability is a half-measure. Housing-plus-transportation is the real number. And by that real number, our two jurisdictions both run roughly 57% of household income. Every family that goes from two cars to one saves more money in a year than almost any single affordable-housing policy will generate for that household. That isn’t a rhetorical flourish. It’s just arithmetic. So how do we effect the math?
By making it easy to take the bus and ride bikes. But remember CNT rated both Key West and the rest of the Keys as “car-dependent.” So, if we can fix that…
But taking the bus isn’t so easy anywhere in the Keys, is it?
Why Almost Nobody Rides the Bus — And Why That Can Change
Here’s the number that should stop everyone in their tracks and the reason the CNT says the Keys are “car-dependent.”. According to the U.S. Census, about half of one percent of Monroe County workers — 0.5% — use public transit to get to work. The Key West city number is in the same microscopic neighborhood. Either way, almost nobody rides the bus.
That isn’t proof nobody wants transit. It’s proof the service isn’t good enough to use. You can’t tell your boss you’ll be ninety minutes late because you missed the bus.
The reasons aren’t a mystery — they show up in every conversation locals have about transit. Recent comments on the Friends of Car-Free Key West Facebook page describe the lived reality. Kim, a Key West local, wrote that 90% of bus stops are unmarked, the app is hard to figure out, and you can find yourself standing in the wrong spot watching the bus pull away on the other side of the highway. She’d happily sell both her cars and rely on transit, she said, if the system were actually catchable. Shannon, who lives up the Keys, said she’d ride from Big Pine if the bus ran frequently and matched her work hours. Eric figured out he was effectively earning $50 an hour by riding — but only if you have the time to spend waiting. None of these are anti-transit voices. They’re frustrated would-be riders.
And the latent demand shows up in the ridership numbers despite the lousy service. The Lower Keys Shuttle carried 97,522 rides last fiscal year — on 90-to-120-minute headways. The Workforce Express moved 18,399 people on just six trips each way between Stock Island and Bahama Village in a year, and Monroe County contributed nothing to it. The Duval Loop carried more than a million rides over its life before being suspended last fall. People aren’t avoiding the bus because they love paying car insurance. They’re avoiding it because of lack of frequency, limited span of service, non-existent communications and unpredictable apps in the case of on-demand. It’s awful.
There Are Plans To Make Transit Better – We Just Have to Fund Them
The good news is we don’t have to invent the answer. The City has been doing the planning work for years. A quick tour of what’s already on paper:
The Lower Keys Shuttle — Marathon to Key West and back, the spine of regional transit in the Lower Keys. I wrote about it two weeks ago: the workhorse that, with 30-minute frequency and span of service into the late evening, becomes a racehorse. The City’s updated 10-Year Transit Development Plan calls for exactly that.
The Duval Loop — the free downtown circulator, suspended December 31. The same updated plan shows it returning under multiple FY27 scenarios.
The Workforce Express — Stock Island to Bahama Village, a quiet workhorse that moves working people to working jobs, but with just six trips daily in each direction needs a lot more frequency and a simpler route to be useful. Operated by the City, used by County residents, funded by neither at anything close to the level the demand justifies.
Two new fixed routes — a North Connector running through New Town from the airport, and a South Connector linking the 3900 South Roosevelt Avenue housing complexes to downtown. Both are in the March 2026 update of the plan, slated for possible FY27 launch.
Key West Rides — the City’s existing on-demand service, which fills gaps in places fixed routes can’t reach. Not a substitute for frequency, but a useful complement.
None of this is speculative. It’s all in adopted, published plans. The planning work is done. What’s missing is the funding — and the political decision to treat transit as the affordability tool it is.
And Then There Are the Bikes
The locals already know. Two of the comments on that Facebook thread came from neighbors saying — politely or otherwise — you’ve heard of a bicycle, right? They’re right. Key West and Stock Island are four miles by two miles, flat as a pancake, warm year-round. PeopleforBikes ranked Key West the #1 biking city in Florida and one of the top 50 in North America for two years running. For getting around the island, the bicycle is — already, today — a real option for most people who live and work here. The Census says 13 – 15% of residents already do.
And the e-bike changes the conversation entirely. Electric assist takes the sweat, the hills (well, the bridges), and the distance objections off the table. An older resident who hasn’t been on a bike in twenty years can ride one. A nurse finishing a 12-hour shift at LKMC can get home to Bahama Village without arriving exhausted. A worker on Stock Island can commute to a downtown hotel in less than fifteen minutes without a parking hassle. On Key West and Stock Island, the e-bike is the affordability multiplier the rest of America doesn’t have. Most cities can only dream of geography this friendly to two wheels.
Up the Keys, the bike’s role shifts. There, the bicycle is the first-and-last-mile partner to the bus. The Lower Keys Shuttle now has three bike racks per bus that fit wider tires. The City has invested in bike racks at every bus stop, fix-it stations, and lighting along the corridor. A worker in Big Pine bikes five minutes to the shuttle stop, racks the bike, rides into Key West, reverses the trip at the end of the day. That’s a real commute, available today, and it gets dramatically more useful when the bus comes every 30 minutes instead of every 90-120.
Budgets Are Where Priorities Show Up
Here’s where this gets concrete. The City of Key West has four strategic priorities, as City staff repeatedly emphasized at the January 27 parking garage workshop: infrastructure, affordable housing, sustainability and environmental adaptation, and financial stability. (The City’s website still lists a slightly older 2024–25 set — but in both versions, affordable housing is one of the priorities.) Rightly. It belongs there.
What’s not on the list: transportation. That’s the structural problem. The City’s own strategic plan recognizes that affordable housing matters. It hasn’t yet recognized that affordable transportation is the other half of the same equation — the half BLS data tells us is $1,110 a month per household.
And yet transportation is very much a City function. Key West Transit operates the Duval Loop, the Workforce Express, the Lower Keys Shuttle, and Key West Rides. The City has an excellent, recently updated 10-Year Transit Development Plan. It has an adopted Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan. It has a just-adopted Safety Action Plan with 36 projects and a price tag. The planning is done. The shelf is full.
At the County, the story is harder. Monroe County had a regional transit vision once — a 30-minute frequency service running the full length of the Keys, championed by the transit director the County hired and pushed by Commissioner David Rice. Last summer, the County dismantled its transit department. Budgets say more about priorities than speeches do.
What happened last summer, at the County and City, was a priority statement.
This summer is a new budget cycle, and the choice will look different. County Administrator Christine Hurley has signaled her office plans to bring Lower Keys Shuttle and Workforce Express improvement proposals to the BOCC, if other budget pressures don’t crowd them out. On the City side, the Transit Development Plan update lays out three FY27 scenarios — ranging from restoring just the Duval Loop (a roughly $150,000 gap in a $160 million general fund) to the full three-route build-out (a $1.6 million gap). The funding tools to close that gap don’t require new resident taxes. Parking revenue, cruise disembarkation fees, a TDC partnership, and the Tourist Development Tax for tourist-serving transit are all already on the table. They’ve been on the table for years.
Some of the leadership on this is already in place. Commissioner Sam Kaufman has been the most consistent transit and bike vote on the City Commission for years. Commissioner Monica Haskell has driven the TDT-for-tourist-transit argument. Commissioners David Rice and Michelle Lincoln on the County side have been responsive to questions about regional transit. Every candidate who is on the August ballot — for mayor, for the three open City Commission seats, for the two County Commission seats — has the chance to pick up the thread and make the connection on affordability to support for public transit and safer streets for bicycling.
Worth Asking at the Forums
These aren’t trick questions. They aren’t partisan. They’re the missing half of the affordability conversation the candidates are already having.
When a candidate says affordability, here are four questions that bring the rest of the family budget into the conversation:
- Does your definition of affordability include transportation — the second-biggest bill most Keys families pay?
- Will you fund the transit improvements in the 2026 Transit Development Plan update — restoring the Duval Loop, launching the new North and South Connector routes, and improving frequency on the Lower Keys Shuttle and Workforce Express?
- For County candidates: will you support real Monroe County investment in the Lower Keys Shuttle and Workforce Express — routes that primarily serve County residents working Key West jobs?
- Will you fund the adopted Bike/Ped Master Plan and Safety Action Plan so families that want to go car-lite or car-free can actually do so safely?
Four questions. The answers to them — and the budget votes that follow — will tell you more about a candidate’s commitment to affordability than any campaign tagline ever can.
Keep the Keys the Keys
Come back to where we started. Everyone is talking about affordability — at the gas pump, the grocery line, the kitchen table. National polls say it. Hometown! Key West forums are about to confirm it. The City’s strategic plan names it. Every candidate’s website mentions it.
Keep Key West Key West. Keep the Keys the Keys. Both phrases mean the same thing in the end: keep Keys people in the Keys. The cook in Big Pine. The teacher on Sugarloaf. The nurse on Stock Island. The fourth-generation Conch in Bahama Village. The young couple just trying to stay through one more year.
You can’t keep the Keys the Keys if Keys people can’t afford to live here. And you can’t solve the affordability crisis if you’re only solving half of it.
And if you’re reading this thinking this isn’t about me, I’ll never ride a bus — fair enough. But you’ll feel it when it’s gone. You’ll feel it when your favorite restaurant can’t keep a line cook because they couldn’t afford to keep their second car running. You’ll feel it when the school can’t hire a teacher who can’t make the math work. You’ll feel it when the nurse who took care of your mother on the third floor at LKMC moves to Homestead. The transportation half of the affordability equation is what keeps the people who make this place the Keys here in the Keys. We all have a stake in it.
Housing is one half. Transportation is the other. The plans are on the shelf. The budget decisions are coming this summer. The candidates are already talking about affordability. We just need them — and us — to do the whole math.
Budgets say more about priorities than speeches do.
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Chris Hamilton is the founder of Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown, a local advocacy group championing sustainable mobility and vibrant public spaces. Subscribe to the blog and follow on Facebook, Twitter, and Substack for updates. All stories are cross posted at KONK Life News. Originally from Washington, D.C., Chris spent over two decades leading nationally acclaimed initiatives in transit, biking, walking, and smart growth for Arlington County, VA’s DOT. Since moving to Key West in 2015, he has embraced a car-free lifestyle downtown, dedicating his time to non-profits and community projects. Explore all Streets for People column articles here.