31 ms·

Report ranks U.S. metros based on how many jobs residents can access by transit

43 points by fizl 12y ago

turar 12y ago
All maps in the actual report: http://www.access.umn.edu/research/america/transit2014/maps/index.html http://www.access.umn.edu/research/america/transit2014/maps/...
byoung2 12y ago
It's hit or miss in Los Angeles. You have to live in a specific area that has a transit hub and then work near a connected transit hub for it to be feasible. For example, you could live in San Fernando Valley and commute to Downtown LA (Orange Line bus to Red Line subway), or Santa Monica and Downtown LA very easily (freeway bus), but San Fernando Valley to Santa Monica is impossible to do without going to Downtown LA first (a 2-4 hour commute each way). In heavy traffic those drives are 45 min to 1 hour max.
drewda 12y ago
It's unfortunate that these are (or at least appear to me to be) raw counts, rather than percentages, normalized by each metro area's population or job totals.
- DubiousPusher 12y ago
  Agreed. I think the analysis here plays a little fast and loose with the conclusions it draws from the data.
rch 12y ago
They should adjust for the ratio of housing costs to the income earned from those jobs.
biesnecker 12y ago
It would be nice to see jobs sliceable by median salary or industry or something like that. The part of Austin I live in is, according to the map, home to thousands of walkable jobs, but I guarantee you virtually none of them are information economy jobs.
rbobby 12y ago
I wish they had included Toronto. There's an ongoing debate about how to improve transit and being able to see various options compared against each other empirically would be damn useful. As a philanthropic effort an open system that would allow someone to "play" with transit designs might be a godsend for all urban planners. Add in the ability to easily adjust schedules/stops (e.g. bus every 4 minutes, or add a stop between X and Y), easily add routes (more buses, streetcars, light rail, subway) and compare multiple configurations would be pretty kick ass. Oh and all this in real time with instant updating ;)
- mynegation 12y ago
  As a Toronto resident I would say that the city could use some better planning and zoning. A bunch of high density like Liberty Village, Eglinton west and Flemington Park are served by buses and streetcars (streetcars!) whereas large segments of subway go through low density suburbia-like areas, and zoning laws make it hard to build anything there.
- callahad 12y ago
  If you can find equivalent Canadian data sources for the US Census-based ones listed in http://www.cts.umn.edu/Publications/ResearchReports/reportdetail.html?id=2382 http://www.cts.umn.edu/Publications/ResearchReports/reportde..., I'd be happy to ask Andrew about computing up a map of Toronto. Looks like he'd primarily need replacements for U.S. Census TIGER 2010 datasets: blocks, core-based statistical areas (CBSAs) and the U.S. Census Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) 2011 Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES)
  - rbobby 12y ago
    Here's what may be the transit schedule data: http://www.gtfs-data-exchange.com/agency/ttc/ http://www.gtfs-data-exchange.com/agency/ttc/ For the specific Census data... all I can do is point to http://www.statcan.gc.ca/start-debut-eng.html http://www.statcan.gc.ca/start-debut-eng.html, the top level of Stats Canada. I tried to find similar datasets but wasn't even close to successful. CANSIM seems to be the bit where you can download the "raw" data... but finding the right CANSIM table(s) appears to be more difficult than I expected.
bronbron 12y ago
Having lived in Boston, SF, Seattle, and now NYC (and having visited LA on numerous occasions), not at all surprised to see this. Even considering the population differences, NYC wins by a large margin if the goal is 'best public transportation', and by proxy 'best metro area for commuters'. NYC has (by far) the best public transportation system in the US. Nothing even comes close, though obviously MTA is not perfect. The BART stops running at midnight and doesn't go everywhere, the T is basically an east coast version of the BART, and King County Metro is just a shit show in general. Granted, NYC obviously has the population to support such a great transportation system. But I wonder if it's a self-fulfilling prophecy: NYC public transit is good, and so more people are willing to live in the metro area and commute. Commuting from Westport, CT to NYC daily isn't a huge deal. Commuting from Brentwood to SF every day would be a nightmare.
- techsupporter 12y ago
  > and King County Metro is just a shit show in general. Ah, yes, I was wondering if I was going to read this here. In the same sentence that you give BART a pass for stopping at midnight and not going "everywhere," Metro gets written off completely. Even thought it has a 5am to 1am span of service, 14 night owl routes, daily express service from as far out as North (freakin') Bend, and is the most-used mode of transportation to jobs in Seattle, it's a "shit show."
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Erm, there is also Sound Transit, which completes the system a bit. I wish it wasn't all bus based; Portland does much better than Seattle in this regards.
  - bronbron 12y ago
    Unless it's changed DRASTICALLY in the last couple years, yes it's a shit show. I would frequently walk home from Fremont to Ravenna because it was 2 AM and there was no way to get home aside from getting in a cab (and good luck competing with the million other people trying to get a cab that time of night), or waiting maybe an hour for a bus to maybe come by when it was supposed to. At least in SF there was no illusion of public transportation to get me anywhere very far after midnight. As to why it's a "shit show" as compared to other cities, Metro is constantly in limbo and notoriously unreliable. Didn't they just cut a bunch of routes because of budget shortfalls? http://metro.kingcounty.gov/am/future/service-cuts.html http://metro.kingcounty.gov/am/future/service-cuts.html EDIT: The whole reason OBA is/was even remotely popular is because of how notoriously unreliable buses are in Seattle.
2xlbuds 12y ago
One thing that this report didn't really take into account is the ratio of car travel time to metro travel time. Sure, you can get to most places in San Jose on the VTA in under 2 hours, but you can also drive there in under 30 minutes.
pchristensen 12y ago
Additional excellent analysis by transit planner Jarrett Walker: http://www.humantransit.org/2014/10/access-across-america.html http://www.humantransit.org/2014/10/access-across-america.ht...
grandalf 12y ago
The fantastic transit in NYC, along with a very large population, makes for significantly increased labor market liquidity. As in any market, increased liquidity translates to reduced risk. For this reason I think that within 5-10 years NYC will overtake SF / Bay Area as the optimal startup economy/environment in the US.
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/are-we-done-yet-with-new-york-tech-hype/ http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/are-we-done-yet-with-new-york-...
  - grandalf 12y ago
    NYC isn't there yet, but there are so many intrinsic advantages it's just a matter of time. The biggest impediment is cultural. Most of the tech talent is very cautious and by the book. However this is changing. NYC Papers We Love is a great example of what the future holds... As is clojure.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      NYC will get there when they move the city to the west coast. There is something different about the west: wide open spaces, mountains, good weather, that you can't really replicate in the east.
      - Bahamut 12y ago
        The New York night life cannot be beaten in the US for many reasons. The sheer volume of people also means that people have a good chance of having good ties to NYC even when never having lived there. Love the weather out here in the Bay Area, but there is a part of me that will always miss NYC and the whole tri-state area (well, minus Long Island anyhow ;) ) - hell, the whole east coast in general.
        seanmcdirmid 12y ago
bane 12y ago
I was surprised D.C. ranks so low [1] I've been to most of the big cities in the U.S. and despite having some problems the D.C. (the city proper) system is easily the 2nd best public transport. It's no NYC, but it's not bad. By wider extension, the links into the Maryland and Virginia systems are also pretty good. Looking at the map it's not even clear to me why it's ranked below LA or SF. It provides lots of coverage and covers a vast area. Then I realized they were measuring time as part of their ranking and yeah, I guess I can see that. The D.C. metro area is larger than all of L.A. county and it can take forever to get around it. 1 - BTW, the map for D.C. is here https://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v4/ctswebrequest.jlb2j0ip/page.html?access_token=pk.eyJ1IjoiY3Rzd2VicmVxdWVzdCIsImEiOiJTb19VUHM0In0.muGg6tMDG4NOGrV4qQQ8yw#10/38.7835/-77.7434 https://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v4/ctswebrequest.jlb2j0ip/page.ht...
- rayiner 12y ago
  It's not NYC, and it's not Chicago or Philly either. DC suffers for making the Metro do double duty as a subway and commuter rail. Plus, many of the suburban stops have awful walk ability (silver line)
  - bane 12y ago
    Yeah, you're right, outside of the city proper (and the very nearby surrounding areas like Arlington and Silver Spring) the walkability is terrible. We'll see if it improves, the model of "stick a station out in the suburbs and build huge parking garages" is not one that I like. Ideally the areas right around the stations should be high density, very walkable, mixed residential-shopping-office. Using the subway system as a commuter rail line means that it can take something like an hour or more to make it from an endpoint station to the city. Plus D.C. has two actual commuter rail systems (VRE for Virginia and MARC for Maryland) plus Amtrak.
yonran 12y ago
The methodology is described here: http://www.cts.umn.edu/Publications/ResearchReports/reportdetail.html?id=2382 http://www.cts.umn.edu/Publications/ResearchReports/reportde.... They calculated the number of jobs that a random worker (assuming everyone lives in the centroid of the Census block he resides in) can get to by transit at every 10 minute threshold, multiplied by an exponential penalty with time constant 12.5 minutes. The metropolitan areas are ranked by this score. This basically says how many jobs that you can catch the bus to, given that you reside somewhere in the metro area. This analysis is more sophisticated than WalkScore’s Transit Score; this analysis uses OpenTripPlanner to simulate trips rather than just counting the number of bus lines near a given location. There are many related questions that are not directly answered by this report, but I think on the top of everyone’s mind is: How many apartments can you afford in commute distance from a random job? I’m guessing San Francisco would no longer rank near the top anymore. To determine whether the transit system is good enough for car-free living, one would also want a score that takes into account trips to other destinations such as bars and grocery stores.
anigbrowl 12y ago
It would be fun to see this XORed with real estate/rental heat maps.
vasilipupkin 12y ago
Surprised that LA is ahead of Chicago
_linden_ 12y ago
Keep in mind that in many places, and in particular in the Bay Area, the entire notion of trying to create short commutes from work to home as an ideal is one that lots of cities still haven't wrapped their head around. I live in Palo Alto and I've heard people tell the City Council that no one wants to take public transportation and therefore we don't need it. I've also heard people scoff at the idea that jobs and housing should be built next to each other to avoid long commutes, emissions, lost time, sprawl, etc. Anyone here who says we need more housing next to all our huge office parks gets called "entitled." We're facing a paradigm shift wherein younger generations want to be able to have the option of taking public transportation. They want to live in lively neighborhoods where friends and spaces for hanging out are close at hand- a trip to the local coffee shop doesn't involve getting in your car and driving to a strip mall. But, people who grew up in the 50s, 60s, and 70s grew up with the notion of the car as freedom and a house in suburbia as the definition of success. To them, quality of life is all about how fast they can drive somewhere and how easily they can park there. When they think "urban" they think "ghetto." These attitudes contribute to the NIMBYism all over the Bay Area and they're the reason why outside of SF, it's extremely hard to get around without a car. It's the reason why despite being the center of innovation on the planet, Silicon Valley still looks like a Leave It To Beaver throwback.

43 points by fizl 12y ago

turar 12y ago

All maps in the actual report: http://www.access.umn.edu/research/america/transit2014/maps/index.html http://www.access.umn.edu/research/america/transit2014/maps/...

byoung2 12y ago

It's hit or miss in Los Angeles. You have to live in a specific area that has a transit hub and then work near a connected transit hub for it to be feasible. For example, you could live in San Fernando Valley and commute to Downtown LA (Orange Line bus to Red Line subway), or Santa Monica and Downtown LA very easily (freeway bus), but San Fernando Valley to Santa Monica is impossible to do without going to Downtown LA first (a 2-4 hour commute each way). In heavy traffic those drives are 45 min to 1 hour max.

drewda 12y ago

It's unfortunate that these are (or at least appear to me to be) raw counts, rather than percentages, normalized by each metro area's population or job totals.

DubiousPusher 12y ago
Agreed. I think the analysis here plays a little fast and loose with the conclusions it draws from the data.

rch 12y ago

They should adjust for the ratio of housing costs to the income earned from those jobs.

biesnecker 12y ago

It would be nice to see jobs sliceable by median salary or industry or something like that. The part of Austin I live in is, according to the map, home to thousands of walkable jobs, but I guarantee you virtually none of them are information economy jobs.

rbobby 12y ago

I wish they had included Toronto. There's an ongoing debate about how to improve transit and being able to see various options compared against each other empirically would be damn useful. As a philanthropic effort an open system that would allow someone to "play" with transit designs might be a godsend for all urban planners. Add in the ability to easily adjust schedules/stops (e.g. bus every 4 minutes, or add a stop between X and Y), easily add routes (more buses, streetcars, light rail, subway) and compare multiple configurations would be pretty kick ass. Oh and all this in real time with instant updating ;)

mynegation 12y ago
As a Toronto resident I would say that the city could use some better planning and zoning. A bunch of high density like Liberty Village, Eglinton west and Flemington Park are served by buses and streetcars (streetcars!) whereas large segments of subway go through low density suburbia-like areas, and zoning laws make it hard to build anything there.
callahad 12y ago
If you can find equivalent Canadian data sources for the US Census-based ones listed in http://www.cts.umn.edu/Publications/ResearchReports/reportdetail.html?id=2382 http://www.cts.umn.edu/Publications/ResearchReports/reportde..., I'd be happy to ask Andrew about computing up a map of Toronto. Looks like he'd primarily need replacements for U.S. Census TIGER 2010 datasets: blocks, core-based statistical areas (CBSAs) and the U.S. Census Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) 2011 Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES)
- rbobby 12y ago
  Here's what may be the transit schedule data: http://www.gtfs-data-exchange.com/agency/ttc/ http://www.gtfs-data-exchange.com/agency/ttc/ For the specific Census data... all I can do is point to http://www.statcan.gc.ca/start-debut-eng.html http://www.statcan.gc.ca/start-debut-eng.html, the top level of Stats Canada. I tried to find similar datasets but wasn't even close to successful. CANSIM seems to be the bit where you can download the "raw" data... but finding the right CANSIM table(s) appears to be more difficult than I expected.

bronbron 12y ago

Having lived in Boston, SF, Seattle, and now NYC (and having visited LA on numerous occasions), not at all surprised to see this. Even considering the population differences, NYC wins by a large margin if the goal is 'best public transportation', and by proxy 'best metro area for commuters'. NYC has (by far) the best public transportation system in the US. Nothing even comes close, though obviously MTA is not perfect. The BART stops running at midnight and doesn't go everywhere, the T is basically an east coast version of the BART, and King County Metro is just a shit show in general. Granted, NYC obviously has the population to support such a great transportation system. But I wonder if it's a self-fulfilling prophecy: NYC public transit is good, and so more people are willing to live in the metro area and commute. Commuting from Westport, CT to NYC daily isn't a huge deal. Commuting from Brentwood to SF every day would be a nightmare.

techsupporter 12y ago
> and King County Metro is just a shit show in general. Ah, yes, I was wondering if I was going to read this here. In the same sentence that you give BART a pass for stopping at midnight and not going "everywhere," Metro gets written off completely. Even thought it has a 5am to 1am span of service, 14 night owl routes, daily express service from as far out as North (freakin') Bend, and is the most-used mode of transportation to jobs in Seattle, it's a "shit show."
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Erm, there is also Sound Transit, which completes the system a bit. I wish it wasn't all bus based; Portland does much better than Seattle in this regards.
- bronbron 12y ago
  Unless it's changed DRASTICALLY in the last couple years, yes it's a shit show. I would frequently walk home from Fremont to Ravenna because it was 2 AM and there was no way to get home aside from getting in a cab (and good luck competing with the million other people trying to get a cab that time of night), or waiting maybe an hour for a bus to maybe come by when it was supposed to. At least in SF there was no illusion of public transportation to get me anywhere very far after midnight. As to why it's a "shit show" as compared to other cities, Metro is constantly in limbo and notoriously unreliable. Didn't they just cut a bunch of routes because of budget shortfalls? http://metro.kingcounty.gov/am/future/service-cuts.html http://metro.kingcounty.gov/am/future/service-cuts.html EDIT: The whole reason OBA is/was even remotely popular is because of how notoriously unreliable buses are in Seattle.

2xlbuds 12y ago

One thing that this report didn't really take into account is the ratio of car travel time to metro travel time. Sure, you can get to most places in San Jose on the VTA in under 2 hours, but you can also drive there in under 30 minutes.

pchristensen 12y ago

Additional excellent analysis by transit planner Jarrett Walker: http://www.humantransit.org/2014/10/access-across-america.html http://www.humantransit.org/2014/10/access-across-america.ht...

grandalf 12y ago

The fantastic transit in NYC, along with a very large population, makes for significantly increased labor market liquidity. As in any market, increased liquidity translates to reduced risk. For this reason I think that within 5-10 years NYC will overtake SF / Bay Area as the optimal startup economy/environment in the US.

w1ntermute 12y ago
http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/are-we-done-yet-with-new-york-tech-hype/ http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/are-we-done-yet-with-new-york-...
- grandalf 12y ago
  NYC isn't there yet, but there are so many intrinsic advantages it's just a matter of time. The biggest impediment is cultural. Most of the tech talent is very cautious and by the book. However this is changing. NYC Papers We Love is a great example of what the future holds... As is clojure.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    NYC will get there when they move the city to the west coast. There is something different about the west: wide open spaces, mountains, good weather, that you can't really replicate in the east.
    - Bahamut 12y ago
      The New York night life cannot be beaten in the US for many reasons. The sheer volume of people also means that people have a good chance of having good ties to NYC even when never having lived there. Love the weather out here in the Bay Area, but there is a part of me that will always miss NYC and the whole tri-state area (well, minus Long Island anyhow ;) ) - hell, the whole east coast in general.
      - seanmcdirmid 12y ago

bane 12y ago

I was surprised D.C. ranks so low [1] I've been to most of the big cities in the U.S. and despite having some problems the D.C. (the city proper) system is easily the 2nd best public transport. It's no NYC, but it's not bad. By wider extension, the links into the Maryland and Virginia systems are also pretty good. Looking at the map it's not even clear to me why it's ranked below LA or SF. It provides lots of coverage and covers a vast area. Then I realized they were measuring time as part of their ranking and yeah, I guess I can see that. The D.C. metro area is larger than all of L.A. county and it can take forever to get around it. 1 - BTW, the map for D.C. is here https://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v4/ctswebrequest.jlb2j0ip/page.html?access_token=pk.eyJ1IjoiY3Rzd2VicmVxdWVzdCIsImEiOiJTb19VUHM0In0.muGg6tMDG4NOGrV4qQQ8yw#10/38.7835/-77.7434 https://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v4/ctswebrequest.jlb2j0ip/page.ht...

rayiner 12y ago
It's not NYC, and it's not Chicago or Philly either. DC suffers for making the Metro do double duty as a subway and commuter rail. Plus, many of the suburban stops have awful walk ability (silver line)
- bane 12y ago
  Yeah, you're right, outside of the city proper (and the very nearby surrounding areas like Arlington and Silver Spring) the walkability is terrible. We'll see if it improves, the model of "stick a station out in the suburbs and build huge parking garages" is not one that I like. Ideally the areas right around the stations should be high density, very walkable, mixed residential-shopping-office. Using the subway system as a commuter rail line means that it can take something like an hour or more to make it from an endpoint station to the city. Plus D.C. has two actual commuter rail systems (VRE for Virginia and MARC for Maryland) plus Amtrak.

yonran 12y ago

The methodology is described here: http://www.cts.umn.edu/Publications/ResearchReports/reportdetail.html?id=2382 http://www.cts.umn.edu/Publications/ResearchReports/reportde.... They calculated the number of jobs that a random worker (assuming everyone lives in the centroid of the Census block he resides in) can get to by transit at every 10 minute threshold, multiplied by an exponential penalty with time constant 12.5 minutes. The metropolitan areas are ranked by this score. This basically says how many jobs that you can catch the bus to, given that you reside somewhere in the metro area. This analysis is more sophisticated than WalkScore’s Transit Score; this analysis uses OpenTripPlanner to simulate trips rather than just counting the number of bus lines near a given location. There are many related questions that are not directly answered by this report, but I think on the top of everyone’s mind is: How many apartments can you afford in commute distance from a random job? I’m guessing San Francisco would no longer rank near the top anymore. To determine whether the transit system is good enough for car-free living, one would also want a score that takes into account trips to other destinations such as bars and grocery stores.

anigbrowl 12y ago

It would be fun to see this XORed with real estate/rental heat maps.

vasilipupkin 12y ago

Surprised that LA is ahead of Chicago

_linden_ 12y ago

Keep in mind that in many places, and in particular in the Bay Area, the entire notion of trying to create short commutes from work to home as an ideal is one that lots of cities still haven't wrapped their head around. I live in Palo Alto and I've heard people tell the City Council that no one wants to take public transportation and therefore we don't need it. I've also heard people scoff at the idea that jobs and housing should be built next to each other to avoid long commutes, emissions, lost time, sprawl, etc. Anyone here who says we need more housing next to all our huge office parks gets called "entitled." We're facing a paradigm shift wherein younger generations want to be able to have the option of taking public transportation. They want to live in lively neighborhoods where friends and spaces for hanging out are close at hand- a trip to the local coffee shop doesn't involve getting in your car and driving to a strip mall. But, people who grew up in the 50s, 60s, and 70s grew up with the notion of the car as freedom and a house in suburbia as the definition of success. To them, quality of life is all about how fast they can drive somewhere and how easily they can park there. When they think "urban" they think "ghetto." These attitudes contribute to the NIMBYism all over the Bay Area and they're the reason why outside of SF, it's extremely hard to get around without a car. It's the reason why despite being the center of innovation on the planet, Silicon Valley still looks like a Leave It To Beaver throwback.