Pittsburgh among top commuter % cities (Philadelphia, York: wage, living in, cost of)

[BrianTH]

So I just stumbled across this dataset, which is interesting to me:

Estimated Daytime Population

Using 2000 Census data, the Census estimated what was happening to the daytime populations of various places due to commuters (non-residents coming in to the place to work). The following is a table I extracted of the percent increase in daytime population due to net commuting (only for the central cities of larger metros):

Washington (DC) 71.8
Orlando 70.7
Atlanta 67.4
Tampa 47.5
Pittsburgh 41.3
Boston 41.1
Miami 37.3
St Louis 35.1
Cincy 31.0
Seattle 28.4
Denver 28.0
Minneapolis 25.0 (St Paul 14.5)
Sacramento 24.8
Cleveland 24.0
Kansas City 23.1
Portland (OR) 23.0
San Francisco 21.7
Charlotte 21.2
Houston 20.6
Dallas 19.1
Indianapolis 15.6
Baltimore 14.2
San Diego 11.6
Columbus (OH) 11.6
Phoenix 7.3
New York 7.0
Philly 5.9
Chicago 4.9
LA 3.5
Las Vegas 2.3
Detroit -0.1
San Jose -5.6

Part of what is going on here is just something we have discussed before, which is that the City of Pittsburgh includes a smaller-than-average percentage of Metropolitan Area residents, which in turn is likely to lead to more of the people working in the City being non-residents. Still, regardless of the causes, this data does have implications for issues such as what sort of contribution non-residents should be making to help fund City services and amenities.

[Blackbeauty212]

Unless I'm reading this wrong....with all the People that come from CT and PA and far reaches of NJ it shocks me that NYC is so low, i would've thought it would be as high as DC.

Hell People commute from the Philly metro to NYC everyday.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by Blackbeauty212

Unless I'm reading this wrong....with all the People that come from CT and PA and far reaches of NJ it shocks me that NYC is so low, i would've thought it would be as high as DC.

Initially I thought it would have been higher in NYC too, but then I realized how many people actually live in largely residential sections of the outer boroughs.

So it actually turns out NYC had the highest number of net commuters in the country (563060, to Washington's 410794). But because its resident population base is 8 million, that is still only a 7% increase. I bet it would be much larger if you looked just at Manhattan, however.

[BrianTH]

So quickly, here are the top cities by net number of commuters, unfiltered down through Philly (so not a total overlap with the last table):

563,060 New York city, NY
410,794 Washington city, DC
403,313 Houston city, TX
259,957 Atlanta city, GA
242,092 Boston city, MA
227,555 Dallas city, TX
168,747 San Francisco city, CA
160,043 Seattle city, WA
155,486 Denver city, CO
144,051 Tampa city, FL
142,328 Chicago city, IL
141,927 San Diego city, CA
138,191 Pittsburgh city, PA
95,476 Minneapolis city, MN (41,497 St. Paul city, MN)
135,066 Miami city, FL
131,501 Orlando city, FL
131,180 Salt Lake City city, UT
127,877 Los Angeles city, CA
127,328 Austin city, TX
122,234 St. Louis city, MO
121,962 Indianapolis city (balance), IN
121,743 Portland city, OR
115,806 Paradise CDP, NV
114,840 Cleveland city, OH
114,655 Charlotte city, NC
106,202 Nashville-Davidson (balance), TN
105,637 Irvine city, CA
102,743 Memphis city, TN
102,720 Cincinnati city, OH
101,966 Kansas City city, MO
100,933 Sacramento city, CA
96,120 Phoenix city, AZ
94,645 Oklahoma City city, OK
93,305 Honolulu CDP, HI
92,625 Baltimore city, MD
90,230 Philadelphia city, PA

Pittsburgh drops a little bit . . . but it is still higher than you would have thought given its relative metro area population

[pman]

Originally Posted by Blackbeauty212

Unless I'm reading this wrong....with all the People that come from CT and PA and far reaches of NJ it shocks me that NYC is so low, i would've thought it would be as high as DC.

Hell People commute from the Philly metro to NYC everyday.

while there are people from philly who do that, it's not really that many in the scheme of things.

I'd be careful what I read into from these statistics. I don't agree with the OP's conclusion that it necessarily reflects the size of the city vs the metro. certainly that's a factor (and for DC, it's probably a relatively large factor, though the cost of living in DC certainly exacerbates that). for philly it's relatively small. that's partly because of the fact it's twice the size of pitt in land area but still, it's only 1.5 million out of nearly 6 million people. more likely, it also reflects the fact that they've experienced a net loss in jobs over the last few decades that the wage tax, once as high as 4.95% (now 3.93%) self selects. fewer people from the suburbs are willing to take those now smaller number of jobs. in other words, it's partly a reflection of the weakness of the CBD's job base. OTOH, pittsburgh's CBD is relatively healthy. DC has an enormous of amount of federal jobs located in the city's core. Third, and am using Philly as a comparison because I know it well, Pittsburgh's residential population downtown is small. Philadelphia has 90k downtown residents so let's say, 35k leave for work outside the CBD and 100k come in, that's a net of 100k whereas if no one lived there, it might be a net of 95k. If this looks at the city as a whole, then it could well reflect that more and more Philadelphians are commuting to the suburbs, offsetting the influx of suburbanites. If Pittsburgh's downtown population balloons to 25k, it could well impact this figure. plenty of people live in manhattan as well, I imagine if you looked at downtown or midtown alone, you'd have a different percentage.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by pman

I don't agree with the OP's conclusion that it necessarily reflects the size of the city vs the metro. certainly that's a factor . . .

To clarify, I stated originally, "Part of what is going on here is just something we have discussed before, which is that the City of Pittsburgh includes a smaller-than-average percentage of Metropolitan Area residents," which I believe would be the same thing as saying "that's a factor". I would agree other factors are likely involved as well.

[BrianTH]

By the way, here is a small list of some metros comparable in size and weighted density to the Pittsburgh metro, ranked by the percentage of the metro population that resides in the central city, with the commuter percentage in parens:

San Antonio 67% (5.9)
San Diego 43% (11.6)
Portland 26% (23.0)
Denver 24% (28.0)
Sacramento 24% (24.8)
Seattle 18% (28.4)
Pittsburgh 13% (41.3)

That isn't anything close to a real study, but I think it confirms both that this is one of the explanatory factors, but also likely not the only explanatory factor.

[pman]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

To clarify, I stated originally, "Part of what is going on here is just something we have discussed before, which is that the City of Pittsburgh includes a smaller-than-average percentage of Metropolitan Area residents," which I believe would be the same thing as saying "that's a factor". I would agree other factors are likely involved as well.

and the part that seemed most important to your pet issue I assume.
from the press release

The places where the largest percent increases in daytime over nighttime populations occur tend to be those with small resident populations.

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/population/005822.html (broken link)

of course, that press release doesn't tell much. where's that study about commuting patterns, and city share of jobs in the metro?

[Katarina Witt]

So more Pittsburghers live in the burbs than San Antonians, San Diegans, Portlanders, etc.

[Blackbeauty212]

Originally Posted by pman

while there are people from philly who do that, it's not really that many in the scheme of things.

I'd be careful what I read into from these statistics. I don't agree with the OP's conclusion that it necessarily reflects the size of the city vs the metro. certainly that's a factor (and for DC, it's probably a relatively large factor, though the cost of living in DC certainly exacerbates that). for philly it's relatively small. that's partly because of the fact it's twice the size of pitt in land area but still, it's only 1.5 million out of nearly 6 million people. more likely, it also reflects the fact that they've experienced a net loss in jobs over the last few decades that the wage tax, once as high as 4.95% (now 3.93%) self selects. fewer people from the suburbs are willing to take those now smaller number of jobs. in other words, it's partly a reflection of the weakness of the CBD's job base. OTOH, pittsburgh's CBD is relatively healthy. DC has an enormous of amount of federal jobs located in the city's core. Third, and am using Philly as a comparison because I know it well, Pittsburgh's residential population downtown is small. Philadelphia has 90k downtown residents so let's say, 35k leave for work outside the CBD and 100k come in, that's a net of 100k whereas if no one lived there, it might be a net of 95k. If this looks at the city as a whole, then it could well reflect that more and more Philadelphians are commuting to the suburbs, offsetting the influx of suburbanites. If Pittsburgh's downtown population balloons to 25k, it could well impact this figure. plenty of people live in manhattan as well, I imagine if you looked at downtown or midtown alone, you'd have a different percentage.

Trust me that number is not as small as you think....I was reading somewhere (I think Phillyblog) that Bucks county is becoming more and more a bedroom community for NYC than it is for Philly even though it is the Philly Metro..Same with South Jersey alot people make that commute every day, so much so Greyhound and Academy runs serveral commuter buses from the area to PA bus term.


Also I think you have to look at the fact that Philadelpia Metro has a large commuter Sprawl... I've seen regional rail lines just as crowded on the reverse commute as the forward...

With living in Pittsburgh, Philly, DC and NYC....Philadelphia was the only city were people commute to work all over the place, in other words if there was a statistic of number of residents who commute in to the suburbs for work....Philly would have to be at the top of that list.

- All of Philadelphia surrounding counties have serveral healthy busniess parks, Horsham, KOP, West Chester, Bucks County, Willow Grove, etc etc etc.

Pittsburgh NY and DC an overwhelming majority of the Metro goes into the CBD's work....