Report: Transit’s Not Keeping Up With ​“Job Sprawl”

Not to toot my own horn too much, but I just wrote something largely on this topic: https://itineranturbanist.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/towards-a-shore-line-metro/ I'd welcome feedback from current New Haveners.

New Haven residents are able to get to just 44 percent of all of the available entry- and mid-level jobs that are now located outside of the city, according to the report, but their lack of access to a private car, or more importantly, a transit system that reliably gets them to work, particularly on nights and weekends, limits their employment opportunities.

Why are we make a big deal of this.It is easy.Go 24hr Transit or do like New York NYC's 'Shadow' Transit Network, Dollar Vans.






9 Factoids About NYC's 'Shadow' Transit Network, Dollar Vans

Wednesday, July 2, 2014, by Zoe Rosenberg

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/07/02/9_factoids_about_nycs_shadow_transit_network_dollar_vans.php


New York's Shadow Transit

Text and map by Aaron Reiss Videos by Nate Lavey and Aaron Reiss


http://projects.newyorker.com/story/nyc-dollar-vans/


My bad I forgot.The Bikers want you just to ride bikes.

So, we paid billions in public money for highways that sucked jobs out of the transit-served city, a gigantic program of public welfare for the suburbs. Then, folks can't get to work so we now have to pay even more to build out an inefficient non-hub transit network to reach the jobs that we previously spent money to move. The best outcome would be to get the jobs back into the city, but it is maybe too late for that. At least we can stop building new job-spreading highways. As in, for example, don't widen I-95.

On the other hand, @SandyJohnston, great ideas in that report, it is like transit porn: wow, look at that hot bus route, drool over the express Metro North trains. (I am serious). You should move back to New Haven, much more fun than Albany.

@3/5s: Dollar vans are helpful, but don't they spring up all by themselves when there is sufficient demand? We apparently have too much sprawl even for unregulated/shadow transit to handle.

Great report from Data Haven. Love the photos, Markeshia. I recommend reading the whole report; I thought I understood the issue till I read it, but I was surprised. Keep it up!

"Job sprawl" is real and a lack of reliable transportation is a serious problem for many households. But the story inaccurately summarizes the report on several points, and the report makes several assertions without providing evidence.

The story says that the report states that the jobs are in the suburbs and the people are in the city. In fact, a substantial majority of the region's population and jobs are in the suburbs. What the report indicates (accurately) is that car-less households are concentrated in the city. But it also finds that even in neighborhoods such as the Hill, most families have access to cars and thus to the jobs that are located in the suburbs.

The story also says that report finds that only 44% of city residents have access to entry- and mid-level jobs in the suburbs. Actually, the report finds that TRANSIT USERS in the city can only access 44% of jobs in the suburbs. Most city use other types of transportation to get to work, and the report finds that nearly three quarters of city households have access to cars.

The report claims that commute distances have "dramatically increased" in recent decades. But census data indicate that average commutes have been essentially constant at a national level, and the report presents no data that this has not been the case in New Haven. In fact, it finds that fewer residents in most neighborhoods were commuting out to the suburbs in 2012 (its endpoint) than in 2000. In the Hill and Fair Haven the proportion remained constant during this period.

The report is in part based on a survey conducted by the NAACP of low income residents. But the report provides no information on how this survey was conducted, not even basic data such as the response rate. As a result, there is no way of telling the extent to which the respondents were representative of low income residents.

The report addresses real problems and makes good recommendations. But it and the story were not well done.

I still say(along with many others on here) one of the easiest improvements to the bus system is just having an outer ring route. Even just 3-4 buses constantly doing the route could probably offer reasonably timed service. Without actually looking at a map, my first thought is maybe a line from downtown West Haven, to the strip malls on upper Whalley, to the Hamden Plaza, to the North Haven plaza(maybe continuing on to down North Haven or busy commercial section of Washington Ave)

Are the jobless jobless because of lack of transportation or are the jobless carless because of lack of jobs? What I mean to say is correlation is not causation. New York City has one of the best public transportation systems in the world but as of mid 2012 had a plus 50% jobless rate amongst blacks...comparable to the New Haven figure illustrated in this report.

posted by: Esbey on January 16, 2015 6:31pm

@3/5s: Dollar vans are helpful, but don't they spring up all by themselves when there is sufficient demand? We apparently have too much sprawl even for unregulated/shadow transit to handle

The vans are regulated.They come under the Taxi and Limousine Commission.The van are a good deal.Also like I said why not 24HR Transit.

I'm agnostic about reforming the transit system, but the wider point here seems to be an odd technocratic view of the city's future, based on what seems like questionable methodology. Rather than map where the jobs are, and then ask people if they need a car (!), before concluding something, why not think about what kind of a city we want and then work toward that. This will always be a choice, and hence political, rather than some data-fetishist project.

My vote goes for a downtown with jobs, which implies a move away from car-centric cold-war suburbanism. So instead of pouring money and time into supporting the current location of jobs, let's put money and time into moving the jobs so that we don't need cars to get there. This is clearly not going to happen overnight - I understand that - but not even questioning this kind of assumption in studies like this is only going to prevent or delay our city's future turn-around.

Pilay: to their credit, the NAACP writes: "will request that state incentives currently provided to businesses to promote job creation in Connecticut be more specifically targeted to areas that are easily accessed by public transportation" as one of the key ways forward, on the last page. There is also a discussion in there of where jobs are being subsidized by government. That's exactly what you (and folks like Center for American Progress) are asking for, and if anyone follows through on it then it definitely would be a challenge to the status quo. The news coverage clearly doesn't do justice to the wide breadth of things that NAACP and workforce agencies want to reform, beyond just making buses run on time.

Job Sprawl or Mission Sprawl?

1) correlation isn't causation
2) as BRADLEY wrote the report methodology and logic is unclear
3) MADCAP is right; we have an in efficient hub+spoke system that could be dramatically tweaked in a simple way; outer ring(s).

although 'job sprawl' is a catchy phrase, the jobs are not moving to the suburbs (or other states and countries) via some magical force. They are moving because the City of New Haven is hostile to businesses in a number of important ways including;

> High property taxes on capital equipment
> High energy costs
> High parking costs
> High labor costs (in unionized situations)
> Perceived lack of safety (I don't agree with this in most cases, but I have talked to many who have moved for this reason)
> Lack of trust in the city as a business partner (ask 360 State)

For these reasons, barber shops, clothing stores, hardware suppliers, utilities (UI), and others have taken their business elsewhere.

If we could stop viewing business as something to be sucked dry and start viewing them as source of jobs and vibrancy for the city and its residents, I think the results would be breathtaking.

Other than property tax which will always be higher than the suburbs what can the City change Lookout? Even property tax is still tied to receiving state funds, and even with PILOT, which does actually help out suburbs (Windsor Locks about of much of it's taxible land to Bradley Airport, and the associated military facilities surround it, as New Haven), it was too much if a struggle to get done in an election year. Being a better partner to business is just lip service and has just as much to do with personalities as policies. The reason businesses leave cities to the suburbs is tax deals. A town like Windsor can make sweet heart deals to companies like ING and Amazon because the property tax lost on the farm land is so insufficient that the money generated by those business being in them offset any tax deals.

Watching this closely from nearby New Jersey, where, if anything, our job sprawl is worse than New Haven's.

My question: Instead of worrying about transit having to keep up with job sprawl, wouldn't it be easier to figure out ways to bring jobs closer to existing transit? Mark Abraham and I have conversed electronically about this and he said the report makes reference to the need for more of those kinds of investments, but I suggest that should be the primary focus of bringing jobs and people closer together, since multiple benefits -- less single-occupancy car commuting and shorter commutes overall being two huge ones -- accrue from doing that rather than investing in expanding transit to places we maybe should not be directing jobs.

For a look at the situation in New Jersey, my employer published a report a couple of years ago called Getting To Work: Reconnecting Jobs With Transit, available here: http://www.njfuture.org/research-publications/research-reports/getting-to-work-reconnecting-jobs-with-transit/