Borrowing Seattle-based Sightline Institute data, development blogger and numbers guy, Andy Coupland, went to work in the StatsCan data mines to come up with some comparison among Vancouver, Seattle and Portland, in order to see how workers travel in their daily commutes. Here are the results, with an important qualification at the bottom.
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Means of transportation among people* who work in the city:
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Transit commuting rates for in-city workers:
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Share of workers within city limits who take transit to work, by men and women:
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Transit commuting rates for in-city workers, by annual income:
* These are workers – not residents (allthough many of the workers in the city are residents) and they’re using as close to possible US definitions – not Canadian (so work at home is a travel mode, for example). Note that they aren’t exactly the same as I can’t make Canadian and US data fit exactly. The caveats at the bottom are important to note. The data are from the Statistics Canada website . Andy
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Wow. The annual income trendline for Vancouver is very sharp, much more so than the others, and I have to wonder what the cause of that is. I wonder how much more the cost of housing or other cost-of-living issues plays in Vancouver than it does in Seattle, as living in the city might eat up a much higher proportion of the total budget for Vancouverites, making transit more of an option. But that still wouldn’t explain why the wealthy in Vancouver are that much less likely to take transit than in Seattle. Very interesting.
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Interesting that Seattle beats Portland in most of these transit categories. Does biking in Portland make up that much of a difference? I’ve thought of Portland as more transit-friendly than Seattle.
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Portland has more LRT than Seattle, that’s for sure, but Seattle has a number of transit advantages that Portland doesn’t, in terms of human factors (a dense concentration of employment in a handful of centres such as downtown) and environmental factors (lots of bottlenecks in the landscape, bridges and the like, which serve to concentrate service and improve frequency). Seattle may not have the flashy stuff, but it’s got higher ridership.
What you won’t notice in the statistics up there is Portland has higher bike usage, but Seattle has more walkers, which means when you clump those two categories together it averages out.
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Interesting about the persistent parallels on the gender differences in taking public transit in all 3 sample cities.
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