Downtown commuters into Chicago by mode?
June 1, 2011 9:47 PM Subscribe
Need help - quickly - finding a statistic about Chicago downtown commuters
Hey, I spent an hour searching for a statistic and found it, but my computer crashed and I can't find it again, even after combing through my search history. So, I put this out to MeFi:
How many people commute into downtown Chicago daily by bus, train, and car? What are the percentages of commuters? I recall the train number was around 45% and cars around 25% with 80000 commuters, but I need to be able to cite this - it's for a paper due tomorrow. I feel like these should be easy to find, but Google is being uncooperative. Thanks in advance!
Hey, I spent an hour searching for a statistic and found it, but my computer crashed and I can't find it again, even after combing through my search history. So, I put this out to MeFi:
How many people commute into downtown Chicago daily by bus, train, and car? What are the percentages of commuters? I recall the train number was around 45% and cars around 25% with 80000 commuters, but I need to be able to cite this - it's for a paper due tomorrow. I feel like these should be easy to find, but Google is being uncooperative. Thanks in advance!
Response by poster: MCMikeNamara: I specifically need the number of commuters who travel to downtown.
posted by LSK at 10:18 PM on June 1, 2011
posted by LSK at 10:18 PM on June 1, 2011
Two leads:
Census Transportation Planning Package (CTPP) reports commuters and mode split by workplace. (Most Census data is by home location -- beware, since commuters who live in downtown will have a much higher walk share and a much lower drive share than those who commute in). Their current fairly easy-to-use site (needs registration, but it's just an online form) has workplace data for the place of Chicago, which is rather larger than downtown (1.4 million commuters). You can try to find the older version of CTPP which has this detail for small geographic areas down to the tract, but it's hard to use.
OnTheMap is a Census product that is a synthetic (due to privacy issues) dataset representing workers in the US. It has an awesome Web interface where you can draw a boundary (or select tracts, etc.) on the map and get detailed reports of the workers inside; for instance, the number of workers, industry, age, wages, race, educational attainment, their home residence and so on. Loads of information here to confirm the number of commuters for any arbitrary definition of downtown, but sadly nothing on mode split.
MetroPulse Chicago has mode split data by municipality, not by downtown.
Last ditch is to look at CMAP's Travel Tracker Survey data; the report may have this broken out in detail, but worst case is you could download the data set yourself and process it. A lot of work for a paper due tomorrow, though.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 2:05 AM on June 2, 2011
Census Transportation Planning Package (CTPP) reports commuters and mode split by workplace. (Most Census data is by home location -- beware, since commuters who live in downtown will have a much higher walk share and a much lower drive share than those who commute in). Their current fairly easy-to-use site (needs registration, but it's just an online form) has workplace data for the place of Chicago, which is rather larger than downtown (1.4 million commuters). You can try to find the older version of CTPP which has this detail for small geographic areas down to the tract, but it's hard to use.
OnTheMap is a Census product that is a synthetic (due to privacy issues) dataset representing workers in the US. It has an awesome Web interface where you can draw a boundary (or select tracts, etc.) on the map and get detailed reports of the workers inside; for instance, the number of workers, industry, age, wages, race, educational attainment, their home residence and so on. Loads of information here to confirm the number of commuters for any arbitrary definition of downtown, but sadly nothing on mode split.
MetroPulse Chicago has mode split data by municipality, not by downtown.
Last ditch is to look at CMAP's Travel Tracker Survey data; the report may have this broken out in detail, but worst case is you could download the data set yourself and process it. A lot of work for a paper due tomorrow, though.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 2:05 AM on June 2, 2011
If it's not too late, you could try calling Chicago's Active Transportation Alliance and asking them.
posted by hydrophonic at 5:42 AM on June 2, 2011
posted by hydrophonic at 5:42 AM on June 2, 2011
Take the population of residents of whatever area you are considering downtown, and then find the "daytime population" (I've seen it mentioned in news stories, but have no idea where the number comes from), and take the difference. There is your raw number of commuters.
Subtract out the ridership of the various public transit options (especially Metra, which is pretty much 100% commuting into and out of the city), and work from there. CTA is going to be hard to parse out, unless you can find a report by them that shows utilization by line/route.
You might be able to find the total number of parking spots in the downtown area and a weekday utilization percentage.
That should give you a fairly accurate number.
(Another option might be to try and find an employment headcount number. Chicago charges a headcount tax on employers, so the Dept. Of Revenue may have data on that.)
posted by gjc at 6:52 AM on June 2, 2011
Subtract out the ridership of the various public transit options (especially Metra, which is pretty much 100% commuting into and out of the city), and work from there. CTA is going to be hard to parse out, unless you can find a report by them that shows utilization by line/route.
You might be able to find the total number of parking spots in the downtown area and a weekday utilization percentage.
That should give you a fairly accurate number.
(Another option might be to try and find an employment headcount number. Chicago charges a headcount tax on employers, so the Dept. Of Revenue may have data on that.)
posted by gjc at 6:52 AM on June 2, 2011
I guess this is a day late for you, but here's something from Metra:
February 2011 report
They say a typical weekday (in February 2011) "load count" (whatever that is) is 297,000. I think that mean total rides on a given day. So, if you assume most people will take a round-trip on that day, it's around 148,000 commuters going into downtown via Metra. (As a daily commuter myself, let me say that I am glad there are multiple stations dropping people off.)
The term you need to look for is "ridership". Play around with that search a bit.
posted by achmorrison at 6:58 AM on June 3, 2011
February 2011 report
They say a typical weekday (in February 2011) "load count" (whatever that is) is 297,000. I think that mean total rides on a given day. So, if you assume most people will take a round-trip on that day, it's around 148,000 commuters going into downtown via Metra. (As a daily commuter myself, let me say that I am glad there are multiple stations dropping people off.)
The term you need to look for is "ridership". Play around with that search a bit.
posted by achmorrison at 6:58 AM on June 3, 2011
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posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:16 PM on June 1, 2011