[CTPP] Out-of-Town Business Travelers in county-to-county flow

TO: CTPP-News The following is an e-mail that I posted to our BayAreaCensus listserv before I went on vacation on 2/28. It's yet another explanation on why we have some apparently very long-distance commuters. Good for us, one of our local reporters re-posted my message to the Investigative Reporters & Editors Census Listserv (IRE), so I hope I was able to help out in regards to interpreting these numbers. Phil's explanation in the message posted to the State Data Center listserv is another (of course, correct) interpretation of these data. It would be interesting to give a common name for these folks, say, "out-of-town business travelers" or some such term.... Chuck Purvis, MTC ******************************************************************************************************************************* The county-to-county data will show data for commuters living in one county and working in a distant county, say, workers residing in Alameda County and working in Los Angeles County. These are probably legitimate responses from legitimate workers, perhaps travelling salesman or other business persons who do, in fact, live in Alameda County and who happened to be in Los Angeles on business during the census reference week (typically, last week of March 2000). Remember, Census 2000 asks "At what location did this person work LAST WEEK?" The census does *NOT* ask "And where did you START your commute from last week, your home? or somebody else's home? or some hotel?" We just do not know the start location of the journey-to-work based on information collected in the decennial census. We can infer that most people start their commute trip from their own home, but we can't definitively state that all workers start work from home. (Perhaps this is why we call this data the "journey-to-work" package, and NOT the "journey-from-home-to-work" package?) So, later this summer when we get the county-to-county commuters by means of transportation to work, we'll certainly have some folks who live in Honolulu and commute to San Francisco by subway in only 20 minutes. This will be good for a few cheap giggles, but THIS ISN'T THE STORY! These are just representative of fairly small numbers of travelling business people who happen to be away from home when they reported their commutes to work! My recommendation would be to lump these ultra-long distance "commuters" into an "at work, but out-of-town" category, for purposes of reporting the data to customers. *************************************************************************************************************************** ************************************************************** 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/ **************************************************************