To: CTPP-News and Urban Data Committee listserv
At our TRB committee's mid-year meeting this past month we discussed a proposed committee project "Commuting to Downtown." We are hoping to have several sets of analyses complete (or at least well under progress) by the January 2004 TRB annual meeting.
The project abstract and the "protoype downtown maps and tables (San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland)" are posted here:
http://www.mtc.ca.gov/trb/urban/commute/
The preface to this abstract reads:
"The United States has invested billions of dollars in transit and highways over the past several decades. One of the issues is measuring the success of transit investments in terms of transit market share. The purpose of this research is to analyze the changes in employment trends and transit commuting to central business districts (CBD) in the United States. The results of this research may point to the obvious: that transit does well in serving commuters working in downtown America, and that high levels of employment density are associated with the highest levels, shares and success stories related to transit commuting. Data from the decennial census is used to characterize workers at CBD-of-work in the largest cities in the United States. Data can be extracted from the various "journey-to-work" datasets including the 1970 Census Urban Transportation Package (UTP), the 1980 Census Urban Transportation Planning Package (UTPP), and the 1990 and 2000 Census Transportation Planning Package (CTPP)."
Much of this analysis is dependent on new data from CTPP 2000, Part 2 (data by zone-of-work or tract-of-work), that none of us have, and we all hope to have before TRB 2004.
This project is intended as a voluntary effort by persons with best access to historical journey-to-work datasets, namely, the MPO staffs in large metropolitan areas. Eventually it would be great to have data for all CBDs in cities with population of 250,000+. My hope is that urban data committee members will be the most eager to participate (New York, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Seattle, San Francisco, Sacramento) and others have already voiced an interest (Atlanta.)
What can be started now is assembling historical journey-to-work data for your CBDs, and mapping of each CBD. Some of this may be tough to impossible, for example, the 1970 UTP or the 1980 UTPP for your area may not be archived or accessible. At the very least we would want to examine changes between 1990 and 2000. In addition, there may be university researchers who can pitch in to assemble and reduce the historical data, or to help on the cartography.
At the committee meeting we discussed the need to have "multiple definitions of CBDs" for the largest cities: e.g., the San Francisco financial district compared to the greater San Francisco CBD; the Chicago "loop" versus the greater downtown, etc.
Any persons interested in contributing to the project just drop me an e-mail.
That's about all for now!
Chuck Purvis, MTC
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Charles L. Purvis, AICP
Principal Transportation Planner/Analyst
Metropolitan Transportation Commission
101 Eighth Street
Oakland, CA 94607-4700
(510) 464-7731 (office)
(510) 464-7848 (fax)
www: http://www.mtc.ca.gov/
Census WWW: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/
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