-------- Original Message -------- Subject: FW: comparative analysis of commuting? Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:49:43 -0500 From: "Alan Pisarski" <alanpisarski(a)alanpisarski.com> To: "'Murakami, Elaine'" <Elaine.Murakami(a)fhwa.dot.gov>,"'Ed Christopher'" <edc(a)berwyned.com>om>, "Gen Giuliano" <giuliano(a)rcf.usc.edu>,"Gen Giuliano" <giuliano(a)rcf.usc.edu> HEY GUYS: THE NOTES BACK AND FORTH BELOW WILL PROVIDE BACKGROUND ON THE PAPER ATTACHED. COULD BE A STRONG LINK RE CTPP GROUPS OR URBAN DATA COMM. FEEL FREE TO DISTRIBUTE. Regards, AEP Alan E. Pisarski 6501 Waterway Drive Falls Church Va. 22044 703 941-4257 alanpisarski(a)alanpisarski.com -----Original Message----- From: Alan Pisarski [mailto:alanpisarski@alanpisarski.com] Sent: Monday, February 19, 2007 5:05 PM To: 'Thomas Sick Nielsen' Subject: RE: comparative analysis of commuting? I respond here briefly. I have just read your paper and enjoyed it very much. I do need to think on it more because a lot of the measures are not intuitively obvious. I use much coarser geographic units in Commuting in America III given the need for a national perspective. Please look at my chapter on flows and you will see what I mean. It shows that suburb to suburb flows grow dramatically with area size and the focus on the center declines. This might seem in conflict with your findings but I believe that they can be shown to be consistent. I have felt that although most trips are suburb to suburb -- that most destinations are closer to the center than their home origin, which is the same as saying the work distribution will almost always be tighter to the center than the households'. Your other view re connectivity -- functional integration -- is very important. One measure of that that I use is the % of workers leaving their home county to work. Again a coarser measure than yours. I enclose a map of Georgia that helps make that point. The book addresses how very rapidly it is growing. My sense is that if all the counties (now about 33) in the region each kept their workers "at home" we would have 33 hamlets that were merely adjacent rather than a great metropolitan area. I further believe that as specialization increases we will see this kind of integration increase with the consequent increases in work trip lengths. One of the phenomena we are seeing increasingly is people living in the suburbs of one area (e.g. Baltimore; commuting into the suburbs of another (Wash D.C.) I will pass your paper to others who have such an interest. One of which would be Gen. Giuliano. But more to the point of your interests I will pass this to the TRB Urban Data committee. Its members comprise state and metropolitan area planning agencies and they have the skills and interests to parallel yours. Best regards, I will stay in touch. Alan E. Pisarski Alan E. Pisarski 6501 Waterway Drive Falls Church Va. 22044 703 941-4257 alanpisarski(a)alanpisarski.com -----Original Message----- From: Thomas Sick Nielsen [mailto:SICK@life.ku.dk] Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2007 11:22 AM To: alanpisarski(a)alanpisarski.com Subject: comparative analysis of commuting? Dear Mr. Pisarski I recently ordered "Commuting in America" and then thought about sending our preliminary results on comparative analysis of commute patterns to you. Attached you find a paper that uses commute data to compare interactions in metropolitan areas of the US, UK, Denmark and for now Barcelona in Spain. It is partly based on GIS-based mapping of interaction patterns - and focusses on the increasing scale of functional integration, as well as commuting biases as a stepping stone to conclude on interrelations between metropolitan form and the commuting system. Would you happen to know any US-based researchers that does similar work - and whom might be interested in participating in comparisons between US and Europe? Comparability between the different surveys is of course a problem - but at least general patterns and development trends can be compared. For now - it is my plan to refine the comparisons that I have sketched in the paper - and to include France (in co-operation with INRETS, Marne-de-Valle) and possibly the Czech republic. The Czech republic is interesting as they have had significant changes to the urbanisation patterns within the time-frame covered by comparable commute data (which is generally from around 1980 until present in European countries - the UK go further back - but they have made changes to the methodology recently). I would be happy to receive any comments or feed back! Sincerely Thomas Sick Nielsen Thomas Sick Nielsen, Assistant Professor, Ph.D. Danish Centre for Forest, Landscape and Planning University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Life Science Rolighedsvej 23 DK-1958 Frederiksberg C Email: sick(a)life.ku.dk Web: http://en.sl.life.ku.dk/omskovoglandskab/medarbejdere/sick.aspx? Tel: +45 35 28 18 30 Mobile: +45 26 200 360