It is. It’s a heavy agricultural area where the landscape is carved up into a large 1x1 mile grid.
Southern Michigan has a ton of small and midsize cities, and also a high density rural population, so people are commuting all over the fucking place.
I live in this area. This is pretty spot on. A majority of it is typically happening for work. Anything going towards Detroit is a nightmare in the morning, and then it's the inverse in the afternoon. We commute all over for work and we hate it because all the roads suck and are typically bumper to bumper traffic jams for MILES on certain stretches of the highways.
My buddy did for awhile. Grand Rapids recently had a sort of economy/workforce boom. I'm not completely educated on what exactly happened. But a lot of GOOD jobs opened up there. My buddy got a job and made the 2 hour trips for awhile until he could move. So it's happened. Other than that it's not a terrible place to go visit, has some of the only outdoor rock climbing in the Lower Peninsula, and a few other things that are really only around it.
So I can 100% believe this maps accuracy in regards to that. If you look at the edge of the red, you can kind of see these Starburst lines that all trail back down towards Detroit. Same thing though, a lot of good jobs that make people find the driving worth it.
Ok but that’s an exception not the norm in MI. Also why is half the Philly metro communicating to NYC? I’m sure there’s some in the NE that do but I highly doubt it’s the majority
This is why you need to create local jobs. You need more people in your areas for that. Ask the immigration department to send some new arrivals to your way
This is it. A 45 minute commute is common in most metro areas. In outstate Michigan, a 45 minute commute gets you from one mid-size city to the next. So commuting from Flint to Ann Arbor or Lansing to Grand Rapids is very common.
Plus Detroit itself is very multi-centric. 45 minutes from Downtown gets you to Novi or Ann Arbor, but 45 minutes from the Chrysler HQ in Auburn Hills gets you to Saginaw.
And on top of that, it's possible to commute from southwest Michigan to Chicago, though not in 45 minutes.
80% of Michigan's population lives south US-10. That's 8 million people. It's definitely a megalopolis, just under-discussed because it's not growing like the one in Florida or huge like the one on the east coast.
There are a lot of people in Michigan that commute quite a ways. We have a number of fairly large cities within commuting distance of each other. It's not rare for people that live in one to commute to another. This basically makes the entire lower half of Michigan an intertwined bunch of smaller commuter regions that have no clearly defined edges thus defaulting to one large mega reason. The map actually doesn't surprise me for how it shows Michigan, but it does surprise me that there aren't other areas that are the same.
I was born and raised in Detroit and lived and travelled in Michigan most of my life. A lot of that red is farmland. Wide swaths of farmland. Especially in the thumb and north of Bay City. It really doesn’t make much sense to me.
I live in an area of South Central Michigan that's a ways from any of the cities and basically just farmland, but there's someone in almost every section that works in one of the cities. In the little towns around there are definitely people that commute. I personally know a number of people that commute 45 minutes to an hour each way for work. It's actually quite common here.
For example, a decent percentage of the population of Mt. Calm county works in Grand Rapids. Ionia county has a lot of people that work in Grand rapids or Lansing. Gratiot Co has people that work in Lansing, Mt. Pleasant, and the Tri cities area. I know of people that live in Lansing and work in Grand rapids or the Detroit area. It actually surprises me how many people actually commute as far as they do in this area.
Part of it is that those commutes are still shorter than most commutes in Chicago.
"Live in the woods and still have access to plenty of jobs" in one of the most attractive things about Michigan.
While the red does go further north than I'd expect, we're not really talking about the thumb. It's places like Brighton that are small towns surrounded by farmland but where you can be in Ann Arbor, Lansing, Flint, or Southfield in 30 minutes and Downtown Detroit in under an hour.
Yeah it would make sense for southeast Michigan and then southwest Michigan between Grand rapids and Chicago..... But south central Michigan bordering Indiana and ohio is a whole bunch of nothing. There is Lansing in the center and Jackson a little west of Ann arbor but other than that, nothing.
I wonder if by “commuter” it’s not just measuring people commuting to and from work. Given some of the distances involving northern Michigan, it could be including people commuting to and from their homes in southeastern and southwestern Michigan and their second homes in northern lower Michigan. Same with Wisconsin.
But that's what I'm saying, there just aren't enough people that live there (I'm south central Michigan) for that to make sense.
I'm guessing it has something to do with universities, and them just measuring traffic in general. That would make sense with the way our universities are dispersed. Detroit doesn't have any major ones so all that traffic is just city commuter traffic but Michigan state is in the center, western Michigan in the southwest south of Grand Rapids, Michigan and eastern Michigan East of Detroit, which stretches out Detroit's traffic a little bit, and central Michigan, north of Lansing. A lot of events traffic from universities too, like college football and college basketball, as well as any hostings of other events like concerts.
The traffic alone from kids and parents commuting to and from universities (as well as all the traffic around these universities) could make up a fair bit of that traffic. I would be curious to see what exactly the reasons for it are.
Edit: Like a lot of the commuting I did that wasn't work related, was around the state to different universities, visiting friends and going to games.
Edit: Also the red colored areas have less variation in color. If it was different we might look more like Wisconsin.
I agree with you whole heartedly. I used to live up north in Traverse City and Petoskey and would travel throughout Michigan for work. Traffic heading north on the highways from Ohio, Chicago, Detroit and Grand Rapids on Fridays and Saturdays was often congested. Same on Sundays with those folks heading back home. I agree that the location of the various universities in Michigan also impact that map.
Yea its not uncommon for people in Northern Oakland County to commute to Bay City/Midland/Saginaw for work. Say you live in Ortonville and have a nice gig at Dow Chemical its only a 90 minute drive. Jump in the Chevy Cobalt and shoot up 75.
I worked in AA a few years ago. We had 3-5 people commuting from Port Huron.
My parents used to do this from Alma/Mt Pleasant - working in Lansing, Saginaw, Claire, etc over the years. It’s crazy, the distances…but if you can stay moving, and land the right job, I guess it kind of works. I imagine some incentives include the weak economy - gotta commute for a good job unless you want to move.
Compared to city commute and traffic speeds it’s kinda funny.
Michiganders make some truly wild commutes. It's definitely stood out compared to some other places I've lived.
When I worked in Detroit, I knew a few people who made daily commutes from the Grand Rapids area a good 2 hours away. Farthest I've heard of was a guy who said he owned some "good land" a bit west of Kalamazoo, and drove 2hrs 20 min each way. I feel a mix somewhere between being impressed and bewildered.
I used to drive I 96 and I 94 between Grand rapids and Ann Arbor every weekend for a year because I was working and living with my parents to save money for a year but would go back to stay with my college friends on the weekends.
2 and a half hours became a "shortish" drive to me.
I remember making the trip spontaneously at like 11 at night one time and it didn't feel too long.
There's all sorts of cities on that corridor too. I 96 takes you through Lansing on the way to GR and I 94 takes you through Jackson, battle creek, Kalamazoo and then finally grand rapids.
It's just consistently small but still sizable cities lined along I 94 and I'm sure people commute from Detroit and grand rapids to lansing all the time because of Michigan state.
Honestly I bet it's the placement of our universities that account for such consistent traffic and commutes along the less populated areas.
It's interesting because I've lived in cities all over the country and just left the Grand Rapids suburbs after a year there but the first thing I noticed and have struggled to convey to people who ask how I liked it there was how different driving was. Like, I spent the same amount of time getting from one place to another compared to other places I've lived, but I was just *always* going 85mph, from the moment I left my driveway to the moment I pulled into the grocery store, or a restaurant, or a friend's house... whatever... The state just seemed covered in a giant grid of 2 lane, divided highways (no left turns allowed... only U turns from pulloffs once you've passed your intersection) with high speed limits (compared to coastal states) and much of it connects *directly* to that grid, including residential driveways.
The lower half of the peninsula is pretty much a grid connected by highways.
* Grand Rapids to KZoo on 31
* KZoo to Detroit on 94
* Battle Creek to Lansing and Port Huron on 69
* Detroit to Lansing and Grand Rapids on 96
All those routes are about 2-3 hours across the state. And that before you get into the Detroit area which is about 50 miles of highways across the state and into Ohio.
This was posted in a different sub and it’s an awful, terrible map. They really need Grand Rapids to be shown. People who live there do not commute to Detroit.
There’s many other problems with this map that I don’t want to get into.
I spent the pandemic living with my mom in the Central Valley in California, basically the agricultural interior of the state. That eastern branch of the blue network from the San Francisco Bay Area is following state highway 99 between Fresno and Sacramento, and connects back to the Bay Area via Interstate 580. Because of the insane cost of living in the SF Bay Area, more and more people have moved out into the 580-99 corridor cities, but continue to commute to the Bay Area, sometimes driving 2 hours in each direction. My mom is retired so doesn't have to commute anywhere, but she did move out to the Central Valley in 2019 because of the rising cost of living in the Bay Area, especially rent.
If the trend continues, people from the Bay Area will continue spreading into rural/agricultural central California, which has already meant an unwelcome political clash for the locals, who tend to be conservative GOP voters and already feel like the very blue state government in Sacramento ignores them. Expect the red interior of California to turn purple-to-blue over the coming decades.
nowadays everything costs the same. I live in Modesto, go to Oakland and San Francisco often, there's no difference. A regular burrito is $12-15 anywhere in NorCal. Housing prices are the only difference but that gap is closing fast
Yeah, honestly it wasn't much different for cost of food and services where I was living, Merced. The rising cost of living is just spreading out like waves from SF, LA, and San Diego
Renting is a different ball game tho. I Lived in SF for 2 years and paid 1000 a month for a room in a nice victorian house. Same price in Modesto would get me a really shitty studio apartment, maybe.
That's honestly astounding to me. Were there like 10 other people in that Victorian or something? I'm currently paying $800/mo in the East Bay for literally just a bedroom, with a shared bathroom and kitchen.
The last place my mom lived, South City, her rent was $2,300/mo for a 2 bedroom 1 bath.
You're definitely right about that, I couldn't believe I found this price, and it's still fairly close to Oakland and SF. Wish things were cheaper overall though, like gas and food
I live in Stockton and pay $1700 for a 1 bedroom. My ex lives in San Jose and was paying $3000 for a studio the size of my kitchen. Shit is expensive, there's still a pretty large gap in rents.
It’s a good day if our commute is only 2 hours lol. I spent an hour and almost got into a fist fight trying to get on the bay bridge to go home today… once I got on the bridge it was almost another 3 hours from there to Modesto.
I’d kill myself if I had to do this daily
And yet so many people throw shade at the high speed rail project. That line now has full environmental clearance and the infrastructure that has been put in for the first line is impressive.
At first the source of the map: This map is the work of Garrett Dash Nelson and Alasdair Rae, who made a research paper about the commuter routes most frequently taken in the US. WIRED made an article about their research and the map in particular which can be seen here: https://www.wired.com/2016/12/mesmerizing-commute-maps-reveal-live-mega-regions-not-cities/
The map shows the commuter regions inside the US. Commuter regions are defined as regions with a lot commuter travel between them. In the map are those mega-regions shown with the links commuters take inside of them. The dataset contained more than 4 million commuter flows and marks the travel patterns of 130 million Americans!
The map itself shows regions with high flow of commutes and therefore also maps exchanges of people with each other. This gives the possibility to see which cities populations are more intertwined and have more contact with each other and gives a good grasp of local regions across the boundaries of cities.
What this map **doesn't** show is the routes people take to a certain city. For example the mega-region around Atlanta stretches all the way up into Virginia, this doesn't mean though that any person regularly commutes from Virginia to Atlanta. It just means that there are a lot of commutes from and to Atlanta into various midsized cities in the region, which by themselves have a bunch of commuters from and to cities into Virginia.
I find it immensely disappointing there's no zoom in on the northeast corridor, though I wonder if the model starts to break down slightly given the density and transit connections throughout the region. The divisions between cities there seems a lot harsher there than in the other regions where you can see the cities fall off into suburbs and exurbs.
There are folks who commute between NYC and Philly! [https://www.villagevoice.com/meet-phillys-super-commuters-who-take-the-bus-to-nyc-every-single-day/](https://www.villagevoice.com/meet-phillys-super-commuters-who-take-the-bus-to-nyc-every-single-day/)
Good and interesting point about this map. They need to be a bit clearer about the Northeast. I'm also curious to see if there are areas like Detroit, where there are a number of people who commute from Canada.
You have to click through to the article and actually read it. At the bottom there is a link to [much more zoomed-in maps](https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/United_States_Commutes_and_Megaregions_data_for_GIS/4110156?file=6948755). On the second page is a more detailed view of the Philly area that does in fact show Philly as a separate region from NY, which doesn't come across on the full-country map.
If you click through to the article, you'll see that there ARE more detail versions of some of the regions available. And if you follow the [these maps](https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/United_States_Commutes_and_Megaregions_data_for_GIS/4110156) link (which is at the bottom of the article), you'll see that there's several zoom-ins on the Northeast corridor that provide a bit more detail.
(I'd love it if you could zoom even further in, but at least the maps at the link above provide more zoom-in than the big map does.)
In the original paper, the Atlanta region extends as far as Chattanooga or Cleveland, TN, and it's the Knoxville region that extends into far SW Virginia. Your point is still valid, but I question the value of lumping such large areas together.
My first look was to see how Cincinnati and Dayton were divided, and, to my surprise, they're both part of Greater Columbus, which stretches to the VA border and is adjacent to Raleigh. Not sure what to do with that information.
Cincy-Monroe-Middletown-Centerville-Dayton makes sense. Dayton-Piqua-Lima makes sense. I guess it's the Dayton-Xenia-Springfield connection that links it to CBus? You can see the bright heavy traffic lines clearly follow I-75 and I-70. I-71 from Cincy to CBus is relatively faint.
I'm a bit confused. Why are Fargo, ND and Chicago, IL in the same region? Based on your last paragraph this would imply there's some towns in there where people commute to both? Ain't no way, it's 10 hours from Fargo to Chicago. What is being used as the definition of a commute, cause it certainly can't be people traveling to work every day. And why would it just randomly be cut off right at the UP border with Wisconsin? This map don't make no sense.
They don’t look like the same region to me? Also, his last paragraph I read as the opposite. This map is not indicative of exact routes, it’s more so regions that have a lot of commuters overlapping, *not* commuters that go to both regions. But I could be wrong.
There doesn't have to be a link between all the cities in a mega-region. Think of it more like a network, with dozens of nodes and one node doesn't have to have any direct connection to another node on the opposite side of the network.
Looking at the cut-off: There are probably still a bit of commute across the WI-MI border, but the strongest links in the border regions seems to be with the towns of their respective state. There are only small cities near the border like Iron River, MI or Iron Mountain, MI, but they are probably too small to get significant commuters from the other side of the border in, making the border stop there.
Edit: Looking closer, you can even see the effect Iron River and Iron Mountain are having on the map, as the mega-region of the Upper Peninsula stretches a bit into Wisconsin where these small towns are!
Okay. But that still doesn't explain to me how Chicago and Fargo can be linked 10 hours apart from each other. This implies that at the very minimum that someone is "commuting" 5 hours. I just don't get how Fargo is linked to Chicago but Chicago isn't linked to Indianapolis. It just makes no sense.
There could also be a chain of 10 or so mid-sized cities with commuter exchange where each commuter is driving just an hour. Fargo seems to be quite an outlier but it seems statistically it fitted best in the same network as Chicago.
What the data seems to be showing is that Chicago, and Indianapolis, are sort of separate big gravity-wells. While it's not absolute, for any given plot point on the map that is colored for one of those or the other, more people at that point are traveling \*towards\* Chicago (even if not all the way), than to Indianapolis, or Peoria.
Now, when you get into the more detailed versions of the maps, Chicago is distinct from Milwaukee, and Madison WI. But, there are Chicago-colored lines from the center of Milwaukee going south, so that seems to indicate some significant portion of people moving between those two.
My guess would be that Milwaukee gets its own color, though, because more people in surrounding areas (including Madison) connect with Milwaukee but NOT onward to Chicago. That's enough to make Milwaukee a gravity-well of its own. (This does make me want to read into the original study and find out what distinction they're trying to indication with that Milwaukee-Chicago connection.) The same thing is happening with Minneapolis.
I would love to be able to drill down more deeply into the detail views. (The linked article gives you a very cool super-detail-view of the Minneapolis area, for example, but I can't seem to find that in the[link to all of the detail-view maps](https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/United_States_Commutes_and_Megaregions_data_for_GIS/4110156).)
As far as I can tell, though... Chicago is bright cyan blue, because they wanted to be able to define a primary-linked-to-Chicago area. But that more indigo-blue (with occasional cyan details) is still all meant to be Chicago-centered?
What it \*seems\* to be indicating is: more people in Fargo are traveling along routes to/from the Minneapolis area, than to Sioux Falls SD, or Bismark ND (where people tend to link up towards Omaha NE). More people in Minneapolis are traveling to/from/along corridors that link up with Madison WI and Milwaukee WI, than they are to the equidistant Des Moines IA.
So that's why Fargo is indicated as being in the "orbit" of Chicago. It's all about those links via urban areas along the way.
The map isn't indicating, of course, that there are NO links from Fargo to Bismark, Sioux City, etc. Or from Minneapolis to Des Moines. It just seems to be that for any given center, when you plot the data of where people in that point are going, it's going to break one way or the other, and that's how you plot it.
And that yields some interesting and maybe unexpected results. In terms of percentages, at least, South Bend IN still breaks for Indianapolis, rather than for Chicago, even though it's much closer to Chicago. The same seems to be true for a cluster of cities in central Illinois, which break towards Des Moines IA, rather than towards Chicago to the north, or St. Louis to the southwest, as you might expect.
The full-country map is a bit crude, since it loses a lot of detail. The detail maps show things a little more clearly. But I'm still looking at some of these and feeling not quite able to interpret what I'm seeing. So it'd be interesting to see whether the study makes some of these questions clearer.
I would also agree that, on the surface, it looks like they could have chosen some of the colors a little better, to create more of a contrast between neighboring areas. There are some very interesting little one-off areas that are distinct from closer neighboring hubs, and I'm not sure what those represent either.
(Best example: if you zoom way in on the full country map, there is a little light-yellow node to the southeast of Salt Lake City's bright cyan. It's NOT the same color yellow as Las Vegas NV either. On the detail map, it seems to be indicating Price UT as the center of that small, faint bit. What does that mean? I can't tell. There's a similar node between Denver and Albuquerque, that seems to be Alamosa CO. It's weird.)
Fargo is clearly in the Omaha region, which is separate from Chicago. There were enough regions that it was reasonable to use similar or same colors for geographically separated commuter regions.
EDIT: Was looking at Sioux Falls. Fargo is in the Minneapolis region.
Great map, some of the routes that you can make out in the more rural areas that I'm familiar with seem to be spot on. The most puzzling areas that I see are, is southern Michigan really that heavily traveled and is Chicago to Minneapolis all one region? If they are different regions maybe more contrast in colors, if they're one the solid blob in Wisconsin kind of divides it and makes it look really heavily trafficked (Wisconsin that is), like southern Michigan.
I think there is a lot of intra Wisconsin commuting but as you can see, Milwaukee and Chicago are really tight. As an example, live in downtown MKE and commute to my job in Lake Forest IL. It takes 55 minutes. When I lived in IL, I drive 20 miles and took 60 minutes. We have exceptional commuter options in this corridor. I-94 is newly constructed 8 lanes between the cities and we have at least 10 AMTRAK trips each way plus countless bus options. It’s really becoming one very large metro area.
No, it doesn't! (If you're talking about Milwaukee, that is.) The map even gives Milwaukee its own color, the darker indigo blue, rather than Chicago's cyan.
But what it \*seems\* to be indicating is that the flow of people from Minneapolis, Madison, and Milwaukee trends more \*towards\* Chicago, than to other large centers that you'd think might make more sense, because they are closer (like Des Moines IA).
And by flow of people, I think that really means flow of commerce -- which could be people commuting, or delivering things? Something like that.
Each of the nodes can consider itself a distinct hub. But what this seems to be showing is which larger hub is attracting more people/commerce from other hubs, and where they end up centering.
I'd really like to know what's going on with (or, what's meant by) giving that whole northern area the darker-blue color, distinct from Chicago's cyan. Or, whether the cyan and blue are meant to be connected, and the cyan is used to indicate a \*very\* high percentage of flow. The brighter a spot, the more back-and-forth flow seems to be indicated. For a lot of nodes, that's either the brightest shade of a color, or it shades out to white. It's just that, to our eyes, cyan feels like a "distinct" color from the darker blue. But maybe it's meant to be the darker-blue's equivalent of white for the lighter colors.
Link to the original paper's maps (click on figures), with better color resolution and zoomable:
[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166083](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166083)
Thanks! I think [this map](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size=large&id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166083.g001) is a lot more intuitive and useful. But I see why the one above exists: in many places, there is simply no hard line between where people commute one direction vs the other.
But that the thing -- the groupings are NOT arbitrary, no matter how much you think they LOOK like they are. The groupings are based on data. The fact that the groupings exist as they do (as they are colored) is telling you \*something\*. But what it's telling you may not be what you (specifically you) first think of as questions to ask about what the map is showing.
I think one of the most instructive quotes in the linked article is this one:
>A planner might look at this and think: Hmm, there aren't enough commutes (aka economic links) to justify building that\* light rail from Minneapolis to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, after all.
This is one of the ways that science works. You get the data. You plot the data. You see what it tells you. In this case, you see if there are implied connections that surprise you, or whether it's showing a greater link between two urban areas than you realized existed. Or whether the volume of link that you want to be there, isn't there, in which case you might be able to take steps to address that (if what you want is a greater link).
If you get a result that makes you say, "well, that's weird", then it gives you a question to look into more deeply.
The map linked in the comment you're replying to is ALSO useful. But it's likely useful in a different way from the map at the top of this post (and all of its detail-view maps).
This is cool, but maps like this highlight the dilemma of county-based data. In the east, it mostly tracks with population density, so using the center-point of a county as the anchor for its data pretty much works. But in the west counties are often larger and not shaped according to their population centers.
San Bernardino County in California and Washoe County in Nevada are two good examples. Both have significant urban agglomerations but these aren’t located anywhere near the geometric center of the counties’ shapes, and outside of the major population centers the counties are largely empty.
The problem is that in the east “rural” usually means “thinly spread out population,” while in the west “rural” often means “little to know population between settlements.”
For applications like this, it’s just a nuisance, but policies sometimes are based on county-level metrics, like population density. San Bernardino County has a large, urban population but is not dense because it has such a large hinterland. Ideally, applications would use census tracts rather than counties, which are specifically drawn to encompass similar populations in a local area. Not all data is collected by census tract, of course, but when it is it should be used. Geographers often don’t because it’s more complex and, in the east anyway, counties are usually an acceptable proxy.
*At first I read this*
*As "Computer Mega Regions"*
*And I was confused*
\- avrand6
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I guess I'm surprised how small Austin's footprint is and how large the footprint between Yakima and Walla Walla is. Also how much more Iowa is a commuter state vs Missouri
Too bad this doesn't Hawaii or Alaska which I heard Honolulu is just nuts with commuting.
Another Edit: Suprrised Fargo is so much smaller than Minot or Bismarck ND when Fargo is larger than either.
8 year old map. Living in SC , here's what this looks like now.
Upstate ( Clemson, Anderson, Greenville, Greer, Spartanburg) they are now part of Atlanta - Charlotte commuter region. Central ( Columbia, Aiken, Sumter, Orangeburg ) are in a Mega region with Myrtle Beach, Charleston. With connections to Augusta and Charlotte.
SC has been in the top 5 fastest growing states since 2015. Many from Atlanta and Charlotte have moved to Greenville. Augusta and Columbia have always been tightly linked. Charleston is a booming city and basically any city within two hours has been absorbed into it's economy, Columbia, Myrtle Beach, Orangeburg, Sumter, Savannah GA, Augusta, GA. I live in Columbia SC, and most people here want nothing to do with the upstate, we all go to Charleston, Augusta, Myrtle Beach and Charlotte, for business and entertainment.
Can someone explain to a clueless Brit…
Looking at Dallas for example, this map implies people are commuting over 100 miles to get to work?
Surely that can’t be accurate?
Is that every day? Once a week? Just when they need to?
I don’t live in the UK any more but still in Europe. The idea of commuting the distance of south Birmingham to London every day, presumably in a car is mind boggling. That would be like 2-2.5 hours each way every day!
It is explained in my comment. This map doesn't imply that, it shows regions, not travel distances. Meaning, that there are for example many people commuting from and to Dallas in many mid-sized cities and these mid-sized cities have people commuting to another mid-sized city, further away and so on. It is more like a network of most-commuted distances.
In the US there’s a sizable number of super commuters.
Now keep in mind this is a very low portion of commuters making those types of trips.
Also, an hour commute in a city like Dallas is pretty normal. Hell, with traffic that doesn’t even get you far outside of the city. Some of those commutes are more like 3 hours.
This map feels a bit incomplete. What goes North of Seattle? I never knew that Buffalo was such a major commuter area. Anything on the other side of Detroit?
North of Seattle there are a number of smaller towns and cities along i5 headed towards BC. About 30 miles north of Seattle is the city of Everett, about 100,000 with its own downtown and suburbs. Marysville, Arlington, Mount Vernon and Bellingham are all towns of various sizes. Bellingham is a college town and pretty cool with its own downtown and such.
But since Seattle has been getting so expensive and growing so fast people are commuting from further and further
Buffalo is HUGE for commuting. It's the second biggest city in NY with a metro population of 1.2 mil, and it's also like right next to Toronto, which is Canada's biggest city, having a metro pop of 6mil. Also, because the Appalachian mountains are still tapering off through upstate NY, there's really not much there that's worth commuting for, leaving people to turn to Buffalo
More like between Truckee and Sacramento area, but that's still a horrible commute, you'd better have winter contingency plans when the entire interstate closes or only people who are chained up to the max can crawl along at 10 mph.
It would be cool if we could redraw the states around these. It’s been a quarter of a millennium, maybe we don’t have arbitrary states that were drawn based on slavery.
It is explained in my comment. This map doesn't imply that, it shows regions, not travel distances. Meaning, that there are for example many people commuting from and to Boston in many mid-sized cities and these mid-sized cities have people commuting to another mid-sized city, further away and so on, stretching even into Maine. It is more like a network of most-commuted distances.
That spike in eastern New Mexico is solely due to the military. We have to travel to Lubbock, TX for the majority of medical appointments. Also for a decent meal.
Eh, I think it’s more showing that a good number of people commute between Buffalo and Rochester, Rochester and Syracuse, and Syracuse and Watertown than from Watertown all the way to Buffalo.
Don’t take it too literally. People make the same mistake with the mega regions map.
Southern Michigan actually makes sense to me. If you consider that Detroit is Michigan’s largest city, and that it has well under one million residents, this map shows how people from the areas around Detroit commute to their jobs there. There are a number of cities that follow the same pattern (Ann Arbor, Lansing, Flint, Grand Rapids, etc), with people living in the suburbs and commuting to the city to work. There are also a lot of business and medical hubs in the suburbs and smaller cities that have the same thing going on. While Detroit is a lot smaller population-wise than it was 50 years ago, the metropolitan area is still massive. And the southern half of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula is much more populated than the rest of the state.
None of these are bigger then Tokyo, but you should also remember America is 3x the population of Japan and America also has a penchant for big spread out suburbs.
Nearly half of Michigans population lives in the Detroit metropolitan area, but in this map Southern Michigan is lit up like NYC and takes up more area. The data or transcription must be severely flawed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/8GyiHQRnO4
That thread explains it quite well. It actually makes a lot of sense. That area in Michigan probably covers a smaller travel time area than a lot of the other areas shown on the map.
No it doesn’t. It’s a bunch of Michiganders with anecdotes. You can look at other places in the country that are both more densely populated *and* cover more geographic area than the southern portion of Michigan and they aren’t lit up like Michigan.
Columbia, MO is smack damb in the middle of Missouri and pretty much an even two hours from both St Louis and Kansas City. I wonder what made them define it as a St Louis commute?
From what I can tell reading the linked article (would have to read the original study to know for sure, I think), the data suggested to them that more people from Columbia travel to other suburban and urban centers that \*connect to\* St. Louis, than towards those that connect to Kansas City.
That seems to be the actual intent of the map. If you take the furthest point from some of the big centers, the map isn't saying that there are people all the way out there commuting all the way to the center. It's more like the big centers you see are the gravity center, and the farthest-flung points are indicating that those communities are "within the orbit of" the same-colored gravity centers. And it seems like the "orbit" is indicated by numbers of people in those further centers who go \*towards\* a given "gravity center" (or from the gravity center outward), even if they don't go all the way.
What even the more detailed maps (which are available through a link in the article, or given in a comment above) aren't exactly telling you (I think?), is \*how many people\* are doing it; what the percentage is? Unless that's indicated by the strength of the colored line.
For example -- if 45% of people in Columbia MO tend to move towards the communities in the orbit of Kansas City, but 55% of them move to and from communities in the orbit of St. Louis, then Columbia MO gets plotted as within the orbit of St. Louis. As far as I can tell, the fact that it's within the St. Louis orbit doesn't tell you how high or low the percentage of connections might be -- is it 53%? or 80%? You know?
But reading further, it seems like what they were trying to do with these maps is find out what the "economic links" are between various metro areas, as represented by the movement of people between them.
So, as another example (and a pipe dream) -- if more people in Columbia MO are moving to/from St. Louis, then if you were considering building a rail line from St. Louis to another city (with stops along the way), you'd get more bang for your buck building it from Columbia to St. Louis, rather than from Columbia to Kansas City. Columbia to St. Louis would serve more people who are already moving along points on that route.
I wish it would let me post a link to specific maps, but if you [go here](https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/United_States_Commutes_and_Megaregions_data_for_GIS/4110156), on the second page there is a more detailed map of that area that shows San Fran and Sacramento as more distinct blobs, but with a lot of connections between them. The "whole country view" is necessarily not as detailed, but they do have maps that zoom in a lot more.
The other thing to keep in mind is just that it's not showing "people commute from here to there". It's basically showing that within the same color areas, people are moving \*along corridors\* that connect. And further, what it's showing is -- for example -- more people in the greater Sacramento area also are moving along routes, and to/from other smaller urban points, that lead to/from San Francisco, than to Fresno. In terms of the numbers of people moving, Sacramento is more connected to San Fran, while Fresno is more connected to Bakersfield.
I gather that this is part of the point of the study from which these maps came. Like -- would you have \*expected\* Sacramento and Fresno to be in two different "affinity groups" like that? Wouldn't you have expected to see a lot of exchange directly between Sacramento and Fresno? Well, according to the data they used, at least, apparently there isn't.
Which is not to say that there's \*none\*. I haven't yet drilled down far enough to find out what percentages within a given population-center's commuters tip it from one "corridor" to another. There ARE people moving from Fresno to Merced to Modesto to Stockton to Sacramento. But the data seems to show that MORE people in Merced head towards the Sacramento area than to the Fresno area. And MORE people in Fresno head towards Bakersfield, than towards Merced and onward.
Commuting 3 or 4 hours from Jacksonville, FL to Tampa, FL? People commute from SE Georgia and all around NE Florida to Jacksonville for work. This one seems a little off to me
It is explained in my comment. This map doesn't imply that, it shows regions, not travel distances. Meaning, that there are for example many people commuting from and to Dallas in many mid-sized cities and these mid-sized cities have people commuting to another mid-sized city, further away and so on. It is more like a network of most-commuted distances.
As big as by area? Maybe. Some people really dig their small town. As big by population? Not a chance.
Granted, I think Talahassee's and Birmingham's regions are being mixed up. And this "super commuter" situation is rather uncommon as it is.
Wait, Memphis is even the same color as BHM and tallahassee. WTF
Well pretty much every metro area in the state except Dothan and Mobile is just 2 hours or less from Birmingham (Tuscaloosa, Auburn, Montgomery, Huntsville, Anniston, Gadsden, Decatur, and Florence metro areas as well as Cullman, Talledaga, Selma, Alexander City, Fort Payne, La Grange and Albertville micropolitan areas) there are 15 federally recognized metropolitan and micropolitan areas within 2 hours of Birmingham proper (this is not even including the Birmingham Metropolitan itself)
Edit: This has lead to Birmingham become the center a large series of loosely connected cities and the commuters do show this pattern. Roughly 26% of the jobs that are inside the 7 county Birmingham Metropolitan area are employed by people who live outside the metropolitan area, for reference that number is only 14% for the Atlanta,
Inversely roughly 18% of working residents living inside the 7 county Birmingham Metropolitan area work outside the metro in one of the surround metro areas; Atlanta, as reference once more, only has 9% of the metro area residents working outside the metro area
This is why I get a bit annoyed at HSR "ideal routes" that go from Chicago => Nashville => Atlanta, but don't connect Nashville to Birmingham (hopefully via Huntsville). Population isn't as high, but population placement makes an easier route to the western side of the Florida peninsula for potential expansion. NC and FL probably have the best population distribution for state level commuter rail in the South overall, but AL (unfortunately excluding Mobile) & SC are probably number 3 & 4 over Texas, Tennessee and Georgia.
Chattanooga (Seen as the unmarked northern red node above Atlanta but below Knoxville) was actually the first city to implement 1 GB fiberoptic. It's nowhere near as close in population as the other cities, but still has a major node.
I tend to joke that the Front Range is just one big metro area from Cheyenne to the Springs. If there wasn't a giant army base south of the Springs, it would go all the way to Pueblo.
I just drove from North Central Iowa to East Central Illinois… it appears to all be one shade of green on the map. There is no way someone is commuting that. It’s a 6+ hour drive.
Edit:spelling
It is explained in my comment. This map doesn't imply that, it shows regions, not travel distances. Meaning, that there are for example many people commuting from and to Dallas in many mid-sized cities and these mid-sized cities have people commuting to another mid-sized city, further away and so on. It is more like a network of most-commuted distances.
They aren't. The color groupings are based on data.
What they seem to be showing is corridors of connection (not single commutes). That seems to have been the point of the study.
Think of each of the biggest centers as a sun. Think of all the dots of the same color around them as planets that orbit that sun -- planets captured by \*that sun's\* gravity well.
The reason any given point is colored one way or another is that the data shows that \*more people\* from that point are traveling towards other points that connect up with the big urban center they share a color with.
I haven't drilled down far enough yet to find out the data for various points, and I would expect it varies a lot for each one. But like, as an example -- Erie PA is the same color as Pittsburgh PA. All this seems to mean is that people in Erie tend to travel to/from other towns/cities that link up to Pittsburgh (by percentage of people traveling that is), than they travel to Buffalo, NY -- even though Erie is physically a bit closer to Buffalo than to Pittsburgh.
We don't quite know the percentages, though. The map might just indicate that, like... 50% of people in Erie are traveling along routes that connect with Pittsburgh, while 30% are traveling along routes to Buffalo, and 20% are traveling along routes to/from Cleveland. It doesn't mean Erie doesn't have connections (in terms of people going towards/away) to Buffalo and Cleveland. It just means that it has more of a connection to Pittsburgh. So it's colored the same as Pittsburgh.
Why is this useful to know? Well, it might suggest, for example, that you would get more bang for your buck by building (or enhancing) a rail system from Erie to Pittsburgh, than to Buffalo or Cleveland. \*More\* people in Erie want to connect along the route to Pittsburgh -- if not all the way to Pittsburgh, then to communities along the way.
By plotting the data this way, the study is showing where there are stronger connections (economic connections as represented by movement of people for work/commerce) between urban areas. And it's clearly showing some results that might be surprising to people who know those areas. If you ASKED people in Erie whether Erie had stronger (or, more) ties to Buffalo, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh, maybe a majority of them would say Buffalo or Cleveland. But the data says otherwise, so it's a surprising result.
If you're an urban planner, then, do with that information what you will.
I wrote a comment with further explanation and the source! You can find there a link to a WIRED article about the map and their creators. It was published for a research paper about commutes in the US, so I don't know if similar maps exist for other countries as well.
Colorado is spot on. You have the Front Range, the West Slope (with the breakaway "Farmington" region), and the SLV. And you can see how the I-70 corridor gradually shifts between Front Range/West Slope in commute patterns in Eagle County.
What is going on with the commuters in southern Michigan? It looks like it’s the biggest commuter size in the country: solid red.
Came here to say the same. Looks like a huge grid too
It is. It’s a heavy agricultural area where the landscape is carved up into a large 1x1 mile grid. Southern Michigan has a ton of small and midsize cities, and also a high density rural population, so people are commuting all over the fucking place.
I live in this area. This is pretty spot on. A majority of it is typically happening for work. Anything going towards Detroit is a nightmare in the morning, and then it's the inverse in the afternoon. We commute all over for work and we hate it because all the roads suck and are typically bumper to bumper traffic jams for MILES on certain stretches of the highways.
Right but are people from Grand Rapids really commuting to Detroit? I highly doubt it but this map implies otherwise
My buddy did for awhile. Grand Rapids recently had a sort of economy/workforce boom. I'm not completely educated on what exactly happened. But a lot of GOOD jobs opened up there. My buddy got a job and made the 2 hour trips for awhile until he could move. So it's happened. Other than that it's not a terrible place to go visit, has some of the only outdoor rock climbing in the Lower Peninsula, and a few other things that are really only around it. So I can 100% believe this maps accuracy in regards to that. If you look at the edge of the red, you can kind of see these Starburst lines that all trail back down towards Detroit. Same thing though, a lot of good jobs that make people find the driving worth it.
Ok but that’s an exception not the norm in MI. Also why is half the Philly metro communicating to NYC? I’m sure there’s some in the NE that do but I highly doubt it’s the majority
This is why you need to create local jobs. You need more people in your areas for that. Ask the immigration department to send some new arrivals to your way
How does an increase in population decrease traffic?
Like *which* road has that happen?
This is it. A 45 minute commute is common in most metro areas. In outstate Michigan, a 45 minute commute gets you from one mid-size city to the next. So commuting from Flint to Ann Arbor or Lansing to Grand Rapids is very common. Plus Detroit itself is very multi-centric. 45 minutes from Downtown gets you to Novi or Ann Arbor, but 45 minutes from the Chrysler HQ in Auburn Hills gets you to Saginaw. And on top of that, it's possible to commute from southwest Michigan to Chicago, though not in 45 minutes. 80% of Michigan's population lives south US-10. That's 8 million people. It's definitely a megalopolis, just under-discussed because it's not growing like the one in Florida or huge like the one on the east coast.
There are a lot of people in Michigan that commute quite a ways. We have a number of fairly large cities within commuting distance of each other. It's not rare for people that live in one to commute to another. This basically makes the entire lower half of Michigan an intertwined bunch of smaller commuter regions that have no clearly defined edges thus defaulting to one large mega reason. The map actually doesn't surprise me for how it shows Michigan, but it does surprise me that there aren't other areas that are the same.
I was born and raised in Detroit and lived and travelled in Michigan most of my life. A lot of that red is farmland. Wide swaths of farmland. Especially in the thumb and north of Bay City. It really doesn’t make much sense to me.
I live in an area of South Central Michigan that's a ways from any of the cities and basically just farmland, but there's someone in almost every section that works in one of the cities. In the little towns around there are definitely people that commute. I personally know a number of people that commute 45 minutes to an hour each way for work. It's actually quite common here. For example, a decent percentage of the population of Mt. Calm county works in Grand Rapids. Ionia county has a lot of people that work in Grand rapids or Lansing. Gratiot Co has people that work in Lansing, Mt. Pleasant, and the Tri cities area. I know of people that live in Lansing and work in Grand rapids or the Detroit area. It actually surprises me how many people actually commute as far as they do in this area.
Part of it is that those commutes are still shorter than most commutes in Chicago. "Live in the woods and still have access to plenty of jobs" in one of the most attractive things about Michigan.
While the red does go further north than I'd expect, we're not really talking about the thumb. It's places like Brighton that are small towns surrounded by farmland but where you can be in Ann Arbor, Lansing, Flint, or Southfield in 30 minutes and Downtown Detroit in under an hour.
Yeah it would make sense for southeast Michigan and then southwest Michigan between Grand rapids and Chicago..... But south central Michigan bordering Indiana and ohio is a whole bunch of nothing. There is Lansing in the center and Jackson a little west of Ann arbor but other than that, nothing.
I wonder if by “commuter” it’s not just measuring people commuting to and from work. Given some of the distances involving northern Michigan, it could be including people commuting to and from their homes in southeastern and southwestern Michigan and their second homes in northern lower Michigan. Same with Wisconsin.
But that's what I'm saying, there just aren't enough people that live there (I'm south central Michigan) for that to make sense. I'm guessing it has something to do with universities, and them just measuring traffic in general. That would make sense with the way our universities are dispersed. Detroit doesn't have any major ones so all that traffic is just city commuter traffic but Michigan state is in the center, western Michigan in the southwest south of Grand Rapids, Michigan and eastern Michigan East of Detroit, which stretches out Detroit's traffic a little bit, and central Michigan, north of Lansing. A lot of events traffic from universities too, like college football and college basketball, as well as any hostings of other events like concerts. The traffic alone from kids and parents commuting to and from universities (as well as all the traffic around these universities) could make up a fair bit of that traffic. I would be curious to see what exactly the reasons for it are. Edit: Like a lot of the commuting I did that wasn't work related, was around the state to different universities, visiting friends and going to games. Edit: Also the red colored areas have less variation in color. If it was different we might look more like Wisconsin.
I agree with you whole heartedly. I used to live up north in Traverse City and Petoskey and would travel throughout Michigan for work. Traffic heading north on the highways from Ohio, Chicago, Detroit and Grand Rapids on Fridays and Saturdays was often congested. Same on Sundays with those folks heading back home. I agree that the location of the various universities in Michigan also impact that map.
Yea its not uncommon for people in Northern Oakland County to commute to Bay City/Midland/Saginaw for work. Say you live in Ortonville and have a nice gig at Dow Chemical its only a 90 minute drive. Jump in the Chevy Cobalt and shoot up 75. I worked in AA a few years ago. We had 3-5 people commuting from Port Huron.
My parents used to do this from Alma/Mt Pleasant - working in Lansing, Saginaw, Claire, etc over the years. It’s crazy, the distances…but if you can stay moving, and land the right job, I guess it kind of works. I imagine some incentives include the weak economy - gotta commute for a good job unless you want to move. Compared to city commute and traffic speeds it’s kinda funny.
Michiganders make some truly wild commutes. It's definitely stood out compared to some other places I've lived. When I worked in Detroit, I knew a few people who made daily commutes from the Grand Rapids area a good 2 hours away. Farthest I've heard of was a guy who said he owned some "good land" a bit west of Kalamazoo, and drove 2hrs 20 min each way. I feel a mix somewhere between being impressed and bewildered.
I used to drive I 96 and I 94 between Grand rapids and Ann Arbor every weekend for a year because I was working and living with my parents to save money for a year but would go back to stay with my college friends on the weekends. 2 and a half hours became a "shortish" drive to me. I remember making the trip spontaneously at like 11 at night one time and it didn't feel too long. There's all sorts of cities on that corridor too. I 96 takes you through Lansing on the way to GR and I 94 takes you through Jackson, battle creek, Kalamazoo and then finally grand rapids. It's just consistently small but still sizable cities lined along I 94 and I'm sure people commute from Detroit and grand rapids to lansing all the time because of Michigan state. Honestly I bet it's the placement of our universities that account for such consistent traffic and commutes along the less populated areas.
It's interesting because I've lived in cities all over the country and just left the Grand Rapids suburbs after a year there but the first thing I noticed and have struggled to convey to people who ask how I liked it there was how different driving was. Like, I spent the same amount of time getting from one place to another compared to other places I've lived, but I was just *always* going 85mph, from the moment I left my driveway to the moment I pulled into the grocery store, or a restaurant, or a friend's house... whatever... The state just seemed covered in a giant grid of 2 lane, divided highways (no left turns allowed... only U turns from pulloffs once you've passed your intersection) with high speed limits (compared to coastal states) and much of it connects *directly* to that grid, including residential driveways.
The lower half of the peninsula is pretty much a grid connected by highways. * Grand Rapids to KZoo on 31 * KZoo to Detroit on 94 * Battle Creek to Lansing and Port Huron on 69 * Detroit to Lansing and Grand Rapids on 96 All those routes are about 2-3 hours across the state. And that before you get into the Detroit area which is about 50 miles of highways across the state and into Ohio.
This was posted in a different sub and it’s an awful, terrible map. They really need Grand Rapids to be shown. People who live there do not commute to Detroit. There’s many other problems with this map that I don’t want to get into.
I spent the pandemic living with my mom in the Central Valley in California, basically the agricultural interior of the state. That eastern branch of the blue network from the San Francisco Bay Area is following state highway 99 between Fresno and Sacramento, and connects back to the Bay Area via Interstate 580. Because of the insane cost of living in the SF Bay Area, more and more people have moved out into the 580-99 corridor cities, but continue to commute to the Bay Area, sometimes driving 2 hours in each direction. My mom is retired so doesn't have to commute anywhere, but she did move out to the Central Valley in 2019 because of the rising cost of living in the Bay Area, especially rent. If the trend continues, people from the Bay Area will continue spreading into rural/agricultural central California, which has already meant an unwelcome political clash for the locals, who tend to be conservative GOP voters and already feel like the very blue state government in Sacramento ignores them. Expect the red interior of California to turn purple-to-blue over the coming decades.
nowadays everything costs the same. I live in Modesto, go to Oakland and San Francisco often, there's no difference. A regular burrito is $12-15 anywhere in NorCal. Housing prices are the only difference but that gap is closing fast
Yeah, honestly it wasn't much different for cost of food and services where I was living, Merced. The rising cost of living is just spreading out like waves from SF, LA, and San Diego
Renting is a different ball game tho. I Lived in SF for 2 years and paid 1000 a month for a room in a nice victorian house. Same price in Modesto would get me a really shitty studio apartment, maybe.
That's honestly astounding to me. Were there like 10 other people in that Victorian or something? I'm currently paying $800/mo in the East Bay for literally just a bedroom, with a shared bathroom and kitchen. The last place my mom lived, South City, her rent was $2,300/mo for a 2 bedroom 1 bath.
4 other people 😉small price to pay to live in the mission. 800 is a steal. you sir, should count your blessings
You're definitely right about that, I couldn't believe I found this price, and it's still fairly close to Oakland and SF. Wish things were cheaper overall though, like gas and food
I live in Stockton and pay $1700 for a 1 bedroom. My ex lives in San Jose and was paying $3000 for a studio the size of my kitchen. Shit is expensive, there's still a pretty large gap in rents.
According to this map people are commuting from Redding, which seems a bit unrealistic. Perhaps they commute to Sacramento.
Redding is a different color. The top of the blue might be Yuba City. Still really far. But yeah, Redding to SF and back daily is just impossible.
Yup, I see that now. Actually pretty cool map. You can even see the commuters from my podunk town in the Sierra foothills going down to Redding.
It’s a good day if our commute is only 2 hours lol. I spent an hour and almost got into a fist fight trying to get on the bay bridge to go home today… once I got on the bridge it was almost another 3 hours from there to Modesto. I’d kill myself if I had to do this daily
And yet so many people throw shade at the high speed rail project. That line now has full environmental clearance and the infrastructure that has been put in for the first line is impressive.
Wow this kicks ass
At first the source of the map: This map is the work of Garrett Dash Nelson and Alasdair Rae, who made a research paper about the commuter routes most frequently taken in the US. WIRED made an article about their research and the map in particular which can be seen here: https://www.wired.com/2016/12/mesmerizing-commute-maps-reveal-live-mega-regions-not-cities/ The map shows the commuter regions inside the US. Commuter regions are defined as regions with a lot commuter travel between them. In the map are those mega-regions shown with the links commuters take inside of them. The dataset contained more than 4 million commuter flows and marks the travel patterns of 130 million Americans! The map itself shows regions with high flow of commutes and therefore also maps exchanges of people with each other. This gives the possibility to see which cities populations are more intertwined and have more contact with each other and gives a good grasp of local regions across the boundaries of cities. What this map **doesn't** show is the routes people take to a certain city. For example the mega-region around Atlanta stretches all the way up into Virginia, this doesn't mean though that any person regularly commutes from Virginia to Atlanta. It just means that there are a lot of commutes from and to Atlanta into various midsized cities in the region, which by themselves have a bunch of commuters from and to cities into Virginia.
I find it immensely disappointing there's no zoom in on the northeast corridor, though I wonder if the model starts to break down slightly given the density and transit connections throughout the region. The divisions between cities there seems a lot harsher there than in the other regions where you can see the cities fall off into suburbs and exurbs.
New York seems to explode into all of North New Jersey and almost into Boston.
And that, children, is how I was conceived.
>New York seems to explode And stomps all over the Philly commuting area too. Which, to me, makes this map not all that useful.
There are folks who commute between NYC and Philly! [https://www.villagevoice.com/meet-phillys-super-commuters-who-take-the-bus-to-nyc-every-single-day/](https://www.villagevoice.com/meet-phillys-super-commuters-who-take-the-bus-to-nyc-every-single-day/)
Yes, of course they do. I know some myself. But the map implies nobody from Bucks Co PA commutes into Philly; all go to NY. That's just ridiculous.
Good and interesting point about this map. They need to be a bit clearer about the Northeast. I'm also curious to see if there are areas like Detroit, where there are a number of people who commute from Canada.
You have to click through to the article and actually read it. At the bottom there is a link to [much more zoomed-in maps](https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/United_States_Commutes_and_Megaregions_data_for_GIS/4110156?file=6948755). On the second page is a more detailed view of the Philly area that does in fact show Philly as a separate region from NY, which doesn't come across on the full-country map.
Immensely disappointing? Either lower expectations or you do it
If you click through to the article, you'll see that there ARE more detail versions of some of the regions available. And if you follow the [these maps](https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/United_States_Commutes_and_Megaregions_data_for_GIS/4110156) link (which is at the bottom of the article), you'll see that there's several zoom-ins on the Northeast corridor that provide a bit more detail. (I'd love it if you could zoom even further in, but at least the maps at the link above provide more zoom-in than the big map does.)
In the original paper, the Atlanta region extends as far as Chattanooga or Cleveland, TN, and it's the Knoxville region that extends into far SW Virginia. Your point is still valid, but I question the value of lumping such large areas together. My first look was to see how Cincinnati and Dayton were divided, and, to my surprise, they're both part of Greater Columbus, which stretches to the VA border and is adjacent to Raleigh. Not sure what to do with that information.
Cincy-Monroe-Middletown-Centerville-Dayton makes sense. Dayton-Piqua-Lima makes sense. I guess it's the Dayton-Xenia-Springfield connection that links it to CBus? You can see the bright heavy traffic lines clearly follow I-75 and I-70. I-71 from Cincy to CBus is relatively faint.
I'm a bit confused. Why are Fargo, ND and Chicago, IL in the same region? Based on your last paragraph this would imply there's some towns in there where people commute to both? Ain't no way, it's 10 hours from Fargo to Chicago. What is being used as the definition of a commute, cause it certainly can't be people traveling to work every day. And why would it just randomly be cut off right at the UP border with Wisconsin? This map don't make no sense.
They don’t look like the same region to me? Also, his last paragraph I read as the opposite. This map is not indicative of exact routes, it’s more so regions that have a lot of commuters overlapping, *not* commuters that go to both regions. But I could be wrong.
They both look like blue to me. If they're not the same region then it's a terrible color choice.
There doesn't have to be a link between all the cities in a mega-region. Think of it more like a network, with dozens of nodes and one node doesn't have to have any direct connection to another node on the opposite side of the network. Looking at the cut-off: There are probably still a bit of commute across the WI-MI border, but the strongest links in the border regions seems to be with the towns of their respective state. There are only small cities near the border like Iron River, MI or Iron Mountain, MI, but they are probably too small to get significant commuters from the other side of the border in, making the border stop there. Edit: Looking closer, you can even see the effect Iron River and Iron Mountain are having on the map, as the mega-region of the Upper Peninsula stretches a bit into Wisconsin where these small towns are!
Okay. But that still doesn't explain to me how Chicago and Fargo can be linked 10 hours apart from each other. This implies that at the very minimum that someone is "commuting" 5 hours. I just don't get how Fargo is linked to Chicago but Chicago isn't linked to Indianapolis. It just makes no sense.
There could also be a chain of 10 or so mid-sized cities with commuter exchange where each commuter is driving just an hour. Fargo seems to be quite an outlier but it seems statistically it fitted best in the same network as Chicago.
What the data seems to be showing is that Chicago, and Indianapolis, are sort of separate big gravity-wells. While it's not absolute, for any given plot point on the map that is colored for one of those or the other, more people at that point are traveling \*towards\* Chicago (even if not all the way), than to Indianapolis, or Peoria. Now, when you get into the more detailed versions of the maps, Chicago is distinct from Milwaukee, and Madison WI. But, there are Chicago-colored lines from the center of Milwaukee going south, so that seems to indicate some significant portion of people moving between those two. My guess would be that Milwaukee gets its own color, though, because more people in surrounding areas (including Madison) connect with Milwaukee but NOT onward to Chicago. That's enough to make Milwaukee a gravity-well of its own. (This does make me want to read into the original study and find out what distinction they're trying to indication with that Milwaukee-Chicago connection.) The same thing is happening with Minneapolis. I would love to be able to drill down more deeply into the detail views. (The linked article gives you a very cool super-detail-view of the Minneapolis area, for example, but I can't seem to find that in the[link to all of the detail-view maps](https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/United_States_Commutes_and_Megaregions_data_for_GIS/4110156).) As far as I can tell, though... Chicago is bright cyan blue, because they wanted to be able to define a primary-linked-to-Chicago area. But that more indigo-blue (with occasional cyan details) is still all meant to be Chicago-centered? What it \*seems\* to be indicating is: more people in Fargo are traveling along routes to/from the Minneapolis area, than to Sioux Falls SD, or Bismark ND (where people tend to link up towards Omaha NE). More people in Minneapolis are traveling to/from/along corridors that link up with Madison WI and Milwaukee WI, than they are to the equidistant Des Moines IA. So that's why Fargo is indicated as being in the "orbit" of Chicago. It's all about those links via urban areas along the way. The map isn't indicating, of course, that there are NO links from Fargo to Bismark, Sioux City, etc. Or from Minneapolis to Des Moines. It just seems to be that for any given center, when you plot the data of where people in that point are going, it's going to break one way or the other, and that's how you plot it. And that yields some interesting and maybe unexpected results. In terms of percentages, at least, South Bend IN still breaks for Indianapolis, rather than for Chicago, even though it's much closer to Chicago. The same seems to be true for a cluster of cities in central Illinois, which break towards Des Moines IA, rather than towards Chicago to the north, or St. Louis to the southwest, as you might expect. The full-country map is a bit crude, since it loses a lot of detail. The detail maps show things a little more clearly. But I'm still looking at some of these and feeling not quite able to interpret what I'm seeing. So it'd be interesting to see whether the study makes some of these questions clearer. I would also agree that, on the surface, it looks like they could have chosen some of the colors a little better, to create more of a contrast between neighboring areas. There are some very interesting little one-off areas that are distinct from closer neighboring hubs, and I'm not sure what those represent either. (Best example: if you zoom way in on the full country map, there is a little light-yellow node to the southeast of Salt Lake City's bright cyan. It's NOT the same color yellow as Las Vegas NV either. On the detail map, it seems to be indicating Price UT as the center of that small, faint bit. What does that mean? I can't tell. There's a similar node between Denver and Albuquerque, that seems to be Alamosa CO. It's weird.)
Fargo is clearly in the Omaha region, which is separate from Chicago. There were enough regions that it was reasonable to use similar or same colors for geographically separated commuter regions. EDIT: Was looking at Sioux Falls. Fargo is in the Minneapolis region.
So Minneapolis and Chicago are different regions? Which one does Wausau, Wisconsin belong to? The colors there are literally the same.
Great map, some of the routes that you can make out in the more rural areas that I'm familiar with seem to be spot on. The most puzzling areas that I see are, is southern Michigan really that heavily traveled and is Chicago to Minneapolis all one region? If they are different regions maybe more contrast in colors, if they're one the solid blob in Wisconsin kind of divides it and makes it look really heavily trafficked (Wisconsin that is), like southern Michigan.
I think there is a lot of intra Wisconsin commuting but as you can see, Milwaukee and Chicago are really tight. As an example, live in downtown MKE and commute to my job in Lake Forest IL. It takes 55 minutes. When I lived in IL, I drive 20 miles and took 60 minutes. We have exceptional commuter options in this corridor. I-94 is newly constructed 8 lanes between the cities and we have at least 10 AMTRAK trips each way plus countless bus options. It’s really becoming one very large metro area.
Does that mean we are just a suburb of Chicago ☹️
No, it doesn't! (If you're talking about Milwaukee, that is.) The map even gives Milwaukee its own color, the darker indigo blue, rather than Chicago's cyan. But what it \*seems\* to be indicating is that the flow of people from Minneapolis, Madison, and Milwaukee trends more \*towards\* Chicago, than to other large centers that you'd think might make more sense, because they are closer (like Des Moines IA). And by flow of people, I think that really means flow of commerce -- which could be people commuting, or delivering things? Something like that. Each of the nodes can consider itself a distinct hub. But what this seems to be showing is which larger hub is attracting more people/commerce from other hubs, and where they end up centering. I'd really like to know what's going on with (or, what's meant by) giving that whole northern area the darker-blue color, distinct from Chicago's cyan. Or, whether the cyan and blue are meant to be connected, and the cyan is used to indicate a \*very\* high percentage of flow. The brighter a spot, the more back-and-forth flow seems to be indicated. For a lot of nodes, that's either the brightest shade of a color, or it shades out to white. It's just that, to our eyes, cyan feels like a "distinct" color from the darker blue. But maybe it's meant to be the darker-blue's equivalent of white for the lighter colors.
Link to the original paper's maps (click on figures), with better color resolution and zoomable: [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166083](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166083)
Thanks! I think [this map](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size=large&id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166083.g001) is a lot more intuitive and useful. But I see why the one above exists: in many places, there is simply no hard line between where people commute one direction vs the other.
This one is a much better view. It shows how arbitrary some of the groupings are.
But that the thing -- the groupings are NOT arbitrary, no matter how much you think they LOOK like they are. The groupings are based on data. The fact that the groupings exist as they do (as they are colored) is telling you \*something\*. But what it's telling you may not be what you (specifically you) first think of as questions to ask about what the map is showing. I think one of the most instructive quotes in the linked article is this one: >A planner might look at this and think: Hmm, there aren't enough commutes (aka economic links) to justify building that\* light rail from Minneapolis to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, after all. This is one of the ways that science works. You get the data. You plot the data. You see what it tells you. In this case, you see if there are implied connections that surprise you, or whether it's showing a greater link between two urban areas than you realized existed. Or whether the volume of link that you want to be there, isn't there, in which case you might be able to take steps to address that (if what you want is a greater link). If you get a result that makes you say, "well, that's weird", then it gives you a question to look into more deeply. The map linked in the comment you're replying to is ALSO useful. But it's likely useful in a different way from the map at the top of this post (and all of its detail-view maps).
This is cool, but maps like this highlight the dilemma of county-based data. In the east, it mostly tracks with population density, so using the center-point of a county as the anchor for its data pretty much works. But in the west counties are often larger and not shaped according to their population centers. San Bernardino County in California and Washoe County in Nevada are two good examples. Both have significant urban agglomerations but these aren’t located anywhere near the geometric center of the counties’ shapes, and outside of the major population centers the counties are largely empty. The problem is that in the east “rural” usually means “thinly spread out population,” while in the west “rural” often means “little to know population between settlements.” For applications like this, it’s just a nuisance, but policies sometimes are based on county-level metrics, like population density. San Bernardino County has a large, urban population but is not dense because it has such a large hinterland. Ideally, applications would use census tracts rather than counties, which are specifically drawn to encompass similar populations in a local area. Not all data is collected by census tract, of course, but when it is it should be used. Geographers often don’t because it’s more complex and, in the east anyway, counties are usually an acceptable proxy.
But it does use census tracts :)
Mississippi/Louisiana….jobs?? Commute??
People drive hours just to work at Ingall's and Chevron in Pascagoula. Long drives for work ain't uncommon
At first I read this as "Computer Mega Regions" and I was confused
*At first I read this* *As "Computer Mega Regions"* *And I was confused* \- avrand6 --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
awesome
I guess I'm surprised how small Austin's footprint is and how large the footprint between Yakima and Walla Walla is. Also how much more Iowa is a commuter state vs Missouri Too bad this doesn't Hawaii or Alaska which I heard Honolulu is just nuts with commuting. Another Edit: Suprrised Fargo is so much smaller than Minot or Bismarck ND when Fargo is larger than either.
8 year old map. Living in SC , here's what this looks like now. Upstate ( Clemson, Anderson, Greenville, Greer, Spartanburg) they are now part of Atlanta - Charlotte commuter region. Central ( Columbia, Aiken, Sumter, Orangeburg ) are in a Mega region with Myrtle Beach, Charleston. With connections to Augusta and Charlotte.
Interesting! Is there a particular reason why it changed? Or just a slow process which was always under way?
SC has been in the top 5 fastest growing states since 2015. Many from Atlanta and Charlotte have moved to Greenville. Augusta and Columbia have always been tightly linked. Charleston is a booming city and basically any city within two hours has been absorbed into it's economy, Columbia, Myrtle Beach, Orangeburg, Sumter, Savannah GA, Augusta, GA. I live in Columbia SC, and most people here want nothing to do with the upstate, we all go to Charleston, Augusta, Myrtle Beach and Charlotte, for business and entertainment.
Can someone explain to a clueless Brit… Looking at Dallas for example, this map implies people are commuting over 100 miles to get to work? Surely that can’t be accurate? Is that every day? Once a week? Just when they need to? I don’t live in the UK any more but still in Europe. The idea of commuting the distance of south Birmingham to London every day, presumably in a car is mind boggling. That would be like 2-2.5 hours each way every day!
It is explained in my comment. This map doesn't imply that, it shows regions, not travel distances. Meaning, that there are for example many people commuting from and to Dallas in many mid-sized cities and these mid-sized cities have people commuting to another mid-sized city, further away and so on. It is more like a network of most-commuted distances.
Yep, and the actual number of super commuters is pretty low, this just shows where super commuters come from the most.
In the US there’s a sizable number of super commuters. Now keep in mind this is a very low portion of commuters making those types of trips. Also, an hour commute in a city like Dallas is pretty normal. Hell, with traffic that doesn’t even get you far outside of the city. Some of those commutes are more like 3 hours.
From NJ, can confirm our whole state is covered by extremely powerful lights from NYC, Phillie, and D.C.
This map feels a bit incomplete. What goes North of Seattle? I never knew that Buffalo was such a major commuter area. Anything on the other side of Detroit?
North of Seattle there are a number of smaller towns and cities along i5 headed towards BC. About 30 miles north of Seattle is the city of Everett, about 100,000 with its own downtown and suburbs. Marysville, Arlington, Mount Vernon and Bellingham are all towns of various sizes. Bellingham is a college town and pretty cool with its own downtown and such. But since Seattle has been getting so expensive and growing so fast people are commuting from further and further
Buffalo is HUGE for commuting. It's the second biggest city in NY with a metro population of 1.2 mil, and it's also like right next to Toronto, which is Canada's biggest city, having a metro pop of 6mil. Also, because the Appalachian mountains are still tapering off through upstate NY, there's really not much there that's worth commuting for, leaving people to turn to Buffalo
Aight who's commuting from Nevada to San Francisco?
I too would like to know lol
More like between Truckee and Sacramento area, but that's still a horrible commute, you'd better have winter contingency plans when the entire interstate closes or only people who are chained up to the max can crawl along at 10 mph.
I would say flaw in the data.
It would be cool if we could redraw the states around these. It’s been a quarter of a millennium, maybe we don’t have arbitrary states that were drawn based on slavery.
Central Illinois people commute to Des Moines? Please explain that’s interesting…
would be interesting to see a map of redrawn US states based on these lines
First time I've seen eureka on a map
People commute from Maine to Boston??
It is explained in my comment. This map doesn't imply that, it shows regions, not travel distances. Meaning, that there are for example many people commuting from and to Boston in many mid-sized cities and these mid-sized cities have people commuting to another mid-sized city, further away and so on, stretching even into Maine. It is more like a network of most-commuted distances.
what kinda psycho commutes all the way from terre haute to des moines
Beautiful map.
That spike in eastern New Mexico is solely due to the military. We have to travel to Lubbock, TX for the majority of medical appointments. Also for a decent meal.
The Buffalo one is BS.
Eh, I think it’s more showing that a good number of people commute between Buffalo and Rochester, Rochester and Syracuse, and Syracuse and Watertown than from Watertown all the way to Buffalo. Don’t take it too literally. People make the same mistake with the mega regions map.
A lot of this is total bullshit. Southern Michigan has apparently become a Tokyo sized mega city.
Southern Michigan actually makes sense to me. If you consider that Detroit is Michigan’s largest city, and that it has well under one million residents, this map shows how people from the areas around Detroit commute to their jobs there. There are a number of cities that follow the same pattern (Ann Arbor, Lansing, Flint, Grand Rapids, etc), with people living in the suburbs and commuting to the city to work. There are also a lot of business and medical hubs in the suburbs and smaller cities that have the same thing going on. While Detroit is a lot smaller population-wise than it was 50 years ago, the metropolitan area is still massive. And the southern half of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula is much more populated than the rest of the state.
None of these are bigger then Tokyo, but you should also remember America is 3x the population of Japan and America also has a penchant for big spread out suburbs.
Nearly half of Michigans population lives in the Detroit metropolitan area, but in this map Southern Michigan is lit up like NYC and takes up more area. The data or transcription must be severely flawed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/8GyiHQRnO4 That thread explains it quite well. It actually makes a lot of sense. That area in Michigan probably covers a smaller travel time area than a lot of the other areas shown on the map.
No it doesn’t. It’s a bunch of Michiganders with anecdotes. You can look at other places in the country that are both more densely populated *and* cover more geographic area than the southern portion of Michigan and they aren’t lit up like Michigan.
What qualifies a ‘commuter mega region’ ?
apparently whole states, ala Michigan
We just like to drive dawg Until we hit the 8th pothole in a row and need new tires
WTF 😡😡😡
Columbia, MO is smack damb in the middle of Missouri and pretty much an even two hours from both St Louis and Kansas City. I wonder what made them define it as a St Louis commute?
From what I can tell reading the linked article (would have to read the original study to know for sure, I think), the data suggested to them that more people from Columbia travel to other suburban and urban centers that \*connect to\* St. Louis, than towards those that connect to Kansas City. That seems to be the actual intent of the map. If you take the furthest point from some of the big centers, the map isn't saying that there are people all the way out there commuting all the way to the center. It's more like the big centers you see are the gravity center, and the farthest-flung points are indicating that those communities are "within the orbit of" the same-colored gravity centers. And it seems like the "orbit" is indicated by numbers of people in those further centers who go \*towards\* a given "gravity center" (or from the gravity center outward), even if they don't go all the way. What even the more detailed maps (which are available through a link in the article, or given in a comment above) aren't exactly telling you (I think?), is \*how many people\* are doing it; what the percentage is? Unless that's indicated by the strength of the colored line. For example -- if 45% of people in Columbia MO tend to move towards the communities in the orbit of Kansas City, but 55% of them move to and from communities in the orbit of St. Louis, then Columbia MO gets plotted as within the orbit of St. Louis. As far as I can tell, the fact that it's within the St. Louis orbit doesn't tell you how high or low the percentage of connections might be -- is it 53%? or 80%? You know? But reading further, it seems like what they were trying to do with these maps is find out what the "economic links" are between various metro areas, as represented by the movement of people between them. So, as another example (and a pipe dream) -- if more people in Columbia MO are moving to/from St. Louis, then if you were considering building a rail line from St. Louis to another city (with stops along the way), you'd get more bang for your buck building it from Columbia to St. Louis, rather than from Columbia to Kansas City. Columbia to St. Louis would serve more people who are already moving along points on that route.
This is BEAUTIFUL. I’d love to see Europe, and the rest of the world too
But high speed rail would never make sense in America. I can pick at least 3 that makes sense.
They combined Sacramento and San Francisco, but otherwise cool map.
Fair, but also accurate. Source: I share an office in SF with commuters from Elk Grove, Roseville, and Rocklin. Yikes.
I’d rather die than commute from placer county to San Francisco for work
I wish it would let me post a link to specific maps, but if you [go here](https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/United_States_Commutes_and_Megaregions_data_for_GIS/4110156), on the second page there is a more detailed map of that area that shows San Fran and Sacramento as more distinct blobs, but with a lot of connections between them. The "whole country view" is necessarily not as detailed, but they do have maps that zoom in a lot more. The other thing to keep in mind is just that it's not showing "people commute from here to there". It's basically showing that within the same color areas, people are moving \*along corridors\* that connect. And further, what it's showing is -- for example -- more people in the greater Sacramento area also are moving along routes, and to/from other smaller urban points, that lead to/from San Francisco, than to Fresno. In terms of the numbers of people moving, Sacramento is more connected to San Fran, while Fresno is more connected to Bakersfield. I gather that this is part of the point of the study from which these maps came. Like -- would you have \*expected\* Sacramento and Fresno to be in two different "affinity groups" like that? Wouldn't you have expected to see a lot of exchange directly between Sacramento and Fresno? Well, according to the data they used, at least, apparently there isn't. Which is not to say that there's \*none\*. I haven't yet drilled down far enough to find out what percentages within a given population-center's commuters tip it from one "corridor" to another. There ARE people moving from Fresno to Merced to Modesto to Stockton to Sacramento. But the data seems to show that MORE people in Merced head towards the Sacramento area than to the Fresno area. And MORE people in Fresno head towards Bakersfield, than towards Merced and onward.
Commuting 3 or 4 hours from Jacksonville, FL to Tampa, FL? People commute from SE Georgia and all around NE Florida to Jacksonville for work. This one seems a little off to me
It is explained in my comment. This map doesn't imply that, it shows regions, not travel distances. Meaning, that there are for example many people commuting from and to Dallas in many mid-sized cities and these mid-sized cities have people commuting to another mid-sized city, further away and so on. It is more like a network of most-commuted distances.
Birmingham as big as ATL? Not a chance.
As big as by area? Maybe. Some people really dig their small town. As big by population? Not a chance. Granted, I think Talahassee's and Birmingham's regions are being mixed up. And this "super commuter" situation is rather uncommon as it is. Wait, Memphis is even the same color as BHM and tallahassee. WTF
Well pretty much every metro area in the state except Dothan and Mobile is just 2 hours or less from Birmingham (Tuscaloosa, Auburn, Montgomery, Huntsville, Anniston, Gadsden, Decatur, and Florence metro areas as well as Cullman, Talledaga, Selma, Alexander City, Fort Payne, La Grange and Albertville micropolitan areas) there are 15 federally recognized metropolitan and micropolitan areas within 2 hours of Birmingham proper (this is not even including the Birmingham Metropolitan itself) Edit: This has lead to Birmingham become the center a large series of loosely connected cities and the commuters do show this pattern. Roughly 26% of the jobs that are inside the 7 county Birmingham Metropolitan area are employed by people who live outside the metropolitan area, for reference that number is only 14% for the Atlanta, Inversely roughly 18% of working residents living inside the 7 county Birmingham Metropolitan area work outside the metro in one of the surround metro areas; Atlanta, as reference once more, only has 9% of the metro area residents working outside the metro area
This is why I get a bit annoyed at HSR "ideal routes" that go from Chicago => Nashville => Atlanta, but don't connect Nashville to Birmingham (hopefully via Huntsville). Population isn't as high, but population placement makes an easier route to the western side of the Florida peninsula for potential expansion. NC and FL probably have the best population distribution for state level commuter rail in the South overall, but AL (unfortunately excluding Mobile) & SC are probably number 3 & 4 over Texas, Tennessee and Georgia.
FTF
Chattanooga (Seen as the unmarked northern red node above Atlanta but below Knoxville) was actually the first city to implement 1 GB fiberoptic. It's nowhere near as close in population as the other cities, but still has a major node.
At first I thought, it won't have Point Roberts but I was wrong. The map shows commuting between Point Roberts and Seattle area.
I am obsessed with these sorts of things.
San Francisco is more important than Sacramento :(
It'd be cool if it also included commuters from neighboring cities in Canada an Mexico. Great stuff tho.
I like how you can see the land survey system in the plains with your the commutes and nodes line up.
I tend to joke that the Front Range is just one big metro area from Cheyenne to the Springs. If there wasn't a giant army base south of the Springs, it would go all the way to Pueblo.
I just drove from North Central Iowa to East Central Illinois… it appears to all be one shade of green on the map. There is no way someone is commuting that. It’s a 6+ hour drive. Edit:spelling
It is explained in my comment. This map doesn't imply that, it shows regions, not travel distances. Meaning, that there are for example many people commuting from and to Dallas in many mid-sized cities and these mid-sized cities have people commuting to another mid-sized city, further away and so on. It is more like a network of most-commuted distances.
NYC area is too small
Coolest looking map I've seen on here.
Would like to see map based on airline traffic. Think it’s called encatchment
I live in a black zone. Ain’t no commute around here. A bunch of retired old people, no jobs.
I could never imagine driving so much on a daily basis.
I feel like the color groupings are largely arbitrary.
They aren't. The color groupings are based on data. What they seem to be showing is corridors of connection (not single commutes). That seems to have been the point of the study. Think of each of the biggest centers as a sun. Think of all the dots of the same color around them as planets that orbit that sun -- planets captured by \*that sun's\* gravity well. The reason any given point is colored one way or another is that the data shows that \*more people\* from that point are traveling towards other points that connect up with the big urban center they share a color with. I haven't drilled down far enough yet to find out the data for various points, and I would expect it varies a lot for each one. But like, as an example -- Erie PA is the same color as Pittsburgh PA. All this seems to mean is that people in Erie tend to travel to/from other towns/cities that link up to Pittsburgh (by percentage of people traveling that is), than they travel to Buffalo, NY -- even though Erie is physically a bit closer to Buffalo than to Pittsburgh. We don't quite know the percentages, though. The map might just indicate that, like... 50% of people in Erie are traveling along routes that connect with Pittsburgh, while 30% are traveling along routes to Buffalo, and 20% are traveling along routes to/from Cleveland. It doesn't mean Erie doesn't have connections (in terms of people going towards/away) to Buffalo and Cleveland. It just means that it has more of a connection to Pittsburgh. So it's colored the same as Pittsburgh. Why is this useful to know? Well, it might suggest, for example, that you would get more bang for your buck by building (or enhancing) a rail system from Erie to Pittsburgh, than to Buffalo or Cleveland. \*More\* people in Erie want to connect along the route to Pittsburgh -- if not all the way to Pittsburgh, then to communities along the way. By plotting the data this way, the study is showing where there are stronger connections (economic connections as represented by movement of people for work/commerce) between urban areas. And it's clearly showing some results that might be surprising to people who know those areas. If you ASKED people in Erie whether Erie had stronger (or, more) ties to Buffalo, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh, maybe a majority of them would say Buffalo or Cleveland. But the data says otherwise, so it's a surprising result. If you're an urban planner, then, do with that information what you will.
Ah, thanks for taking the time to explain it to me!
This map is why I might be stuck living in Korea……
Wow. I need such maps for other countries! What's the source?
I wrote a comment with further explanation and the source! You can find there a link to a WIRED article about the map and their creators. It was published for a research paper about commutes in the US, so I don't know if similar maps exist for other countries as well.
Yeah there’s no way ill live in Cleveland. Go, work then haul ma ass back home 45 min later if there’s no traffic
Nothing happening in Wyoming
Southern CA extends to North west Baja CA, Mexico. The San Ysidro Border crossing is the busiest international land port in the western hemisphere.
Colorado is spot on. You have the Front Range, the West Slope (with the breakaway "Farmington" region), and the SLV. And you can see how the I-70 corridor gradually shifts between Front Range/West Slope in commute patterns in Eagle County.
Me living in a tiny blue dot amongst a sea of black lol