ctpp-news June 1999

ctpp-news@mailman.chrispy.net

6 participants
17 discussions

by ed christopher

Don thanks for reminding me to follow up. the webcast did not go out live as there was some technical difficulty with the hotel's network. however, the session was recorded and i am told it will be uploaded and put online later this week. i will keep checking and once it goes up i will let the list serve know. Don Burrell wrote: > Ed: > I am curious as to whether or not Sunday's TRB CTPP session was successfully > broadcast over the Net. I was not successful in accessing it despite > downloading MediaPlay. While I often suspect such failures are due to my > inexperience with the software, once in a while it turns out that the system > screwed up. > -- > >You will be able to access the live broadcast (and related information > >about this event) through a link in http://www-cta.ornl.gov.

26 years, 11 months

TAZ, FAQ now available

by ed christopher

To asist those who have questions about the TAZ-UP process, the CTPP Planning Group has develop a web page of frequently asked questions. The page will be updated as new questions emerge. It can be reached directly at http://www.mcs.com/~berwyned/census/notes/tazfaq.html or from the subcomittee's main page under the "committee notes and articles" button http://www.mcs.com/~berwyned/census/

26 years, 11 months

Breaking New Ground

by Ed Christopher

This weekend the TRB data committees will be having their mid-year meeting (http://www.bts.gov/midyear.html). As part of it, the Subcommittee on Census Data for Transportation planning will be hosting a session entitled "The Reality of the American Community Survey for Transportation", Sunday, June 27th, 1999, 4:00 PM. The session will be held in the Swissotel Washington--The Watergate, Washington, D.C. I have just learned that the Center for Transportation Analysis at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) together with the TRB will be conducting the first live Internet broadcast of a TRB session during our session. Internet users will be able to see the overhead transparencies (and other visual materials) while listening to the talk in real time. Users will also be able to send questions to the speaker through the chat room connection provided. You will be able to access the live broadcast (and related information about this event) through a link in http://www-cta.ornl.gov. Please notice that in order to see and hear the live broadcast you need to have installed in your computer the Windows Media Player software. Use the "Test" button on the top bar of the web page to determine whether or not this software is installed in your machine. If it is not, then use the "Download Windows MP" button to get a free copy of the software. After downloading Windows Media Player you must proceed to install it. Thanks and questions to Oscar Franzese of Oak Ridge for this, ofz(a)ornl.gov, 423-576-8682.

26 years, 11 months

Census 2000 News Alert

by ed christopher

From: Census2000 <Census2000(a)ccmc.org> House Panel Considers Proposal to Count Americans Overseas; Wisconsin Lawmakers Advocate New Rules for Counting Military Families and Prisoners The House Subcommittee on the Census held a hearing on June 9 to review proposals to count all Americans living overseas in the census and to change the way members of the armed forces stationed in the U.S. and certain prisoners are counted. The panel heard testimony from two Members of Congress, Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt, and several organizations advocating a count of Americans abroad. Subcommittee Chairman Dan Miller (R-FL) said in his opening remarks that "all of these proposals address legitimate concerns." Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), the panel's senior Democrat, said that while Congress should consider these issues, it should do so "in a more systematic fashion and in a time frame that allowed for proper consideration of these ideas." Speaking generally about the three proposals, Dr. Prewitt said: "We need to make sure that any policy changes are consistent with the original intent of the census to determine the 'whole number of persons in each state' for purposes of apportionment." He said lack of sufficient time to "introduce complex new procedures to the design" was the largest barrier to implementing any of the new proposals at this stage of census preparations. Counting Americans living overseas: Rep. Benjamin Gilman (R-NY), who chairs the Committee on International Relations, testified that failure to count private American citizens living overseas in the census is discriminatory. He noted that the Census Bureau plans to count members of the armed forces, civilian employees of federal agencies, and all of their dependents stationed abroad during the census, for congressional apportionment purposes, as it did in 1990. (Apportionment refers to dividing up the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives among the 50 states based on the state population totals compiled from the census.) The congressman said the census should include overseas Americans because of their role in promoting U.S. national interests around the world. Rep. Gilman has introduced House Concurrent Resolution 129 (H. Con. Res. 129), expressing the "sense of the Congress" that the Census Bureau should include all overseas Americans in the 2000 census. The resolution does not specify whether private American citizens living abroad should be counted only for congressional apportionment or for other purposes such as redistricting and allocating program funds. The Bureau only needs to calculate the total population of each state as the basis for apportionment, while the data used for drawing political district boundaries (redistricting) requires placing people and households in specific census blocks. Federal programs require census data at various levels of geography to distribute funds according to a formula or to determine program eligibility. Senator Spencer Abraham (R-MI) is the sponsor of a companion resolution, S. Con. Res. 38. Chairman Miller, who is a cosponsor of the Gilman resolution, observed that Americans living and working overseas "play a key role in advancing our national interests around the world." The chairman said Americans overseas should be included in the census, although we may have to lower our standards of accuracy to do so. Rep. Miller said he supports counting this population in 2000, but that the Census Bureau must prepare to do so in 2010 if it cannot be ready to conduct such a count next year. Director Prewitt suggested in his testimony that Congress commission in-depth studies to explore the highly complex issues involved in counting private American citizens living overseas. He noted that previous attempts to count Americans living overseas have produced data of unusable quality and that the Constitution does not speak to counting the non-resident population. After meeting with advocates of counting this population, the Bureau concluded, "it cannot credibly enumerate the population of American citizens living abroad," Dr. Prewitt said. The director cited concerns about accuracy, since the Bureau does not have reliable estimates of the overseas population to check the progress of the count, as it does in the United States using the master address list and independent population estimates. The Bureau was also concerned that the voluntary nature of an overseas count might tempt some states to mount publicity campaigns in order to boost their populations for apportionment purposes. Dr. Prewitt said the Bureau would need substantial additional funds for an overseas count, as well as considerable lead times to design and print questionnaires and to coordinate the census effort with the State Department. He did not estimate how much a count of overseas Americans would cost. Dr. Prewitt distinguished the inclusion of military and federal civilian personnel stationed overseas by noting that this population is counted using administrative records maintained by the Defense Department and other agencies. The Bureau plans to count overseas military and government personnel at the home of record noted in their personnel file, which usually refers to the place where a person lived when he or she joined the military or federal service. The Bureau followed this policy in 1990, after the House of Representatives passed a bill directing the Bureau to count overseas military personnel at their home of record for apportionment purposes. The House had soundly defeated a proposal in 1988 to count military personnel stationed abroad in the state where they last resided for at least six months before shipping overseas. The subcommittee heard testimony from the Census 2000 Coalition, as well as from representatives of several organizations belonging to the Coalition. Executive Director David Hamod described the Coalition as "an ad hoc, bipartisan group dedicated to including all Americans living and working overseas in next year's census" and said it is comprised of "all major organizations representing U.S. citizens and U.S. companies overseas." The individual organizations testifying at the hearing were the Association of Americans Resident Overseas (AARO); American Chambers of Commerce abroad and Republicans Abroad (one witness, who also identified himself as an officer of the American Business Council of Gulf Countries, represented both of these organizations); Democrats Abroad; and American Citizens Abroad. All of these groups noted that the Overseas Citizens Voting Rights Act of 1975 gave Americans living overseas the right to vote in federal elections in the state and congressional district in which they last resided. Mr. Hamod of the Census 2000 Coalition listed four reasons to include Americans abroad in the 2000 census: promoting U.S. competitiveness, ensuring political representation for all Americans, treating private citizens overseas in the same manner as military and government employees, and ensuring an accurate census. The Coalition did not specify whether it believes private citizens abroad should be counted only for congressional apportionment or for other purposes as well. Mr. Hamod said the Bureau's concerns about an overseas census "are simply red herrings" that are "a pretext to discriminate against Americans abroad." He suggested the Bureau distribute a form prepared by the Coalition through the Bureau's web site, U.S. embassies and consulates, and organizations representing Americans abroad. (Dr. Prewitt, however, chided the group for distributing a draft questionnaire that appeared to be a Census Bureau document.) Responses could be verified, Mr. Hamod said, using passport numbers. Mr. Hamod concluded by saying "it is high time to overhaul an obsolete policy that treats U.S. citizens overseas as nobodies rather than as the valuable national asset they are." Rep. Maloney said "she was sympathetic to the desires of overseas Americans to be counted" but that Congress must address several key questions first. The congresswoman said a count of all overseas Americans would be of "questionable" accuracy because it must rely only on voluntary participation without any procedures to follow-up with people who don't send in a form, as enumerators usually do in the census. She also said Congress must clarify where (for example, last residence, legal residence, or voting residence) and for what purposes these Americans should be included. Rep. Maloney announced that she would introduce legislation to require a census of Americans living overseas in 2003, to give Congress sufficient time to consider whether to include this population in the 2010 count. Subcommittee member Rep. Danny Davis (D-IL) questioned whether an overseas count would be reliable, given the wide ranging estimates of how many Americans live and work abroad. Changing residency rules for counting prisoners and military personnel in the U.S.: At its June 9 hearing, the census subcommittee also discussed proposals to change the way certain prisoners and members of the armed forces stationed in the U.S. are counted in the census. Rep. Mark Green (R-WI) is sponsor of a bill (H.R. 1632) to require that state prisoners be counted as residents of the state that pays more than half of the cost of incarcerating them. The change in counting policy is necessary, Rep. Green testified, to accommodate the growing "practice of states leasing prison space in other states." The congressman argued that because many federal programs rely on census data, "the originating state will lose federal funds to the states which are housing out-of-state prisoners temporarily." Rep. Green noted that about 3,700 Wisconsin prisoners currently are incarcerated in other states and said that number is expected to grow to 10,000 by 2001. He said Wisconsin maintains a database of its prisoners housed in other states that could be used to count these inmates in their home state. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), a member of the census subcommittee, urged support for his bill (H.R. 2067) to count active duty military personnel in the United States at their home of record instead of where they are stationed on Census Day. The congressman said his proposal did not represent a radical change from current Bureau policy and that the Bureau has already changed its standard of usual residence by counting military personnel stationed overseas in their home of record state. According to the Census Bureau's residency rules, which determine where people are counted in the census, prisoners are counted at the facility where they are incarcerated. Active duty members of the armed forces are counted at the military installation or the homeport of the ship to which they are assigned. "Usual residence for census purposes," Director Prewitt testified, "is the place where the person lives and sleeps most of the time." Making an exception for certain prisoners and military personnel, he said, might open a Pandora's box for other exceptions, such as where college students or people receiving out-of-state medical treatment are counted. During the 1990 census, Washington, D.C. challenged the Bureau's practice of counting its inmates who are housed at a prison in Lorton, Virginia, as residents of Virginia. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the Bureau's policy in that case (District of Columbia v. U.S. Department of Commerce, 789 F. Supp. 1179 (D.D.C. 1992). Dr. Prewitt said H.R. 1632 does not address several operational issues, such as whether out-of-state prisoners should be allocated to a specific location in their home state and whether the proposal covers federal prisoners, who he said are more likely to be incarcerated out-of-state. The director said H.R. 2067 would require a significant change to the procedures for counting stateside military personnel. Members of the armed forces in the U.S. receive a census form to complete on their own, as do most other residents not living in a group facility. Rep. Carolyn Maloney suggested that the Green and Ryan proposals were "presumably introduced with the intent of boosting the population totals for Wisconsin, which may lose a seat after the 2000 reapportionment." Both freshmen Wisconsin lawmakers denied that their proposals were motivated by projections showing that the state would lose its 9th congressional district after the 2000 census. They said their goal is to promote an accurate census. Ensuring the confidentiality of census responses: Our effort to provide a thorough summary of proposals to count overseas Americans and change certain residency rules has resulted in a lengthy News Alert today. Therefore, we will report on concerns about the confidentiality of citizenship data collected in the census in a separate News Alert this week. Congressional hearing planned: The House Subcommittee on the Census will hold a field hearing in Racine, Wisconsin, on June 28. The hearing, which is open to the public, will be held in the City Council Chamber from 9:15 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Among the invited witnesses are Governor Tommy Thompson, the mayors of Racine and Milwaukee, and officials from Racine and Kenosha Counties. Questions about the information contained in this News Alert may be directed to TerriAnn Lowenthal at 202/484-2270 or, by e-mail at terriann2k(a)aol.com. For copies of previous News Alerts and other information, use our web site www.census2000.org . Please direct all requests to receive News Alerts, and all changes in address/phone/fax/e-mail, to the Census 2000 Initiative at Census2000(a)ccmc.org or 202/326-8700. Please feel free to circulate this information to colleagues and other interested individuals.

26 years, 11 months

by Howard Simkowitz

subscribe hsimkowitz(a)caliper.com

26 years, 11 months

TransCAD Users

by Sweson Yang

HELP NEEDED When I received our TIGER files and TAZ-Up program couple week ago, I started calling Election Data Services and Caliper Technical Support and was very disappointed with the state of GIS applications. We have our TAZs in Caliper's TransCAD GIS format and our zonal configurations are primarily aggregation of 1990 Census Block Groups. I have no problem in converting these TAZ boundaries to ArcView Shape files. In TransCAD, there is a "TAG' function to populate information from one layer to other layer based on spatial relationship. I understand that ArcView has a "SPATIAL JOIN' function doing similar job. I have tried the "TAG" function in one of our least populated county and the results were very messy assignments of TAZs to the TIGER tgrsscccp files. Well, there must be some pros out there who can point me to the right direction. I am resisting doing manually when I already have my TAZs described nicely in a reputable GIS package. I would welcome any suggestions and am willing to try new methods before I will assign summer interns to recreate 1012 zones for the CTPP. Thanks. Sweson Yang, AICP Chief Transportation Planner City of Indianapolis/Indianapolis MPO (317) 327-5137 FAX: (317) 327-5103 E-mail: syang(a)IndyGov.org

26 years, 11 months

Size of TAZ (second try--this time includes the response!)

by Murakami, Elaine <FHWA>

Incoming query to CTPP: 1. The Size of TAZ : In your TAZ-UP manual(4-6) we have been told that "there are no minimum size criteria for TAZs for CTPP 2000 . ... however, that census data may be suppressed to protect confidentiality if a TAZ is too small." What do you mean "too small"? Could your give us a number (or a range) of RESIDENTS and WORKERS refers to this definition? You provided us 1990 historical mean number/range for RESIDENTS and WORKERS per TAZ. It seems that we have great flexibility to set our own criteria for defining the size of TAZs for CTPP 2000. To avoid possible problems caused by this ambiguity, we prefer to have a clear criteria number or range from you. Do you have any suggestion for us to dealing with those TAZs that have mixed land use? Another words, if a TAZ has both RESIDENTS and WORKERS in it, should we use RESIDENTS or WORKERS to define our TAZs? ----------------- Response from Elaine Murakami, FHWA The text on page 4-6 of the TAZ-UP manual is the best we can do. There is NO strict criteria. What is NOT going to work is for each block to be it's own TAZ. However, there are cases in large urban downtown areas where a large building (let's say it has more than 1000 workers, but no residents) is one block and it makes sense for this block to be its own TAZ. There may be special situations where a TAZ has less than 400 workers or 400 residents, but we would use 400 as a target MINIMUM. Preferably, the minimum should be closer to 600, since we are planning for the CTPP tabulations to have 2-way and 3-way cross tabulations, and if there are too many cells in the cross-tab, we will run into a greater likelihood that data could be suppressed. Areas with mixed land use, I would still use 400 as the minimum for either workers or residents, that is, having 200 residents and 200 workers is still going to cause a problem.

26 years, 11 months

Size of TAZs

by Murakami, Elaine <FHWA>

26 years, 11 months

RE: [CTPP] TAZs -Reply

by Murakami, Elaine <FHWA>

-------incoming query--------- We have updated the TAZ for our MPO area using Arc/Info and Tiger92 lines. They don't exactly overlay the Tiger98 lines. Would ya'll mind if we just sent you those polygons in Arc export format and skipped the TAZ-UP software process? ----------RESPONSE------ Sorry. You MUST use TIGER/Line 98. CTPP is a CENSUS program, and we are limited to using what the Census Bureau tells us. If you read the reference section (pages 7-8), it tells you the "equivalency file" that the Census Bureau needs--it requires the CENID and POLYID from TIGER/Line 98. You can use ArcInfo, and bring in TIGER/Line 98, and write a lovely AML to do the work for you. If you do this, please let others on the CTPP listserve know. Maybe someone else can benefit ! You DO NOT HAVE TO USE TAZ-UP!!!!

26 years, 11 months

Hello.

by nanda srinivasan

Hello to all subscribers of ctpp-news. My name is Nanda Srinivasan. I am trying to learn about the 2000 census effort, particularly in relation to the Census Transportation Planning data. I have a Masters in Transportation planning with two years of experience in GIS issues. I look forward to contributing to the on-going discussions regarding the 2000 CTPP. Thank You Nanda Srinivasan _______________________________________________________________ Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com

26 years, 11 months

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ctpp-news June 1999