Ed Glaeser and I and Nate Baum-Snow and I have written papers about employment sprawl's causes and consequences.
post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/glaeser/papers.htm
http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/Nathaniel_Baum-Snow/
High rents per square foot in the center city and improvements in information technology provide incentives for center city employers to send their "back office" employees to suburban cheaper areas. Suburban executives may also prefer setting up their headquarters close to their house.
An interesting question is for the Mayor of New York City. Imagine an extreme case where all employment leaves New York City for its sububrbs. This would turn Manhattan into a bedroom community. What would be the benefits and costs of this city simply being a consumer city rather than a producer city?
October 17, 2006
Commuter Conformity Is Out for a Metro-North Majority
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
For the first time in the history of the Metro-North Railroad — a quintessential commuter link between the city and the leafy suburbs to the north — fewer than half of its riders are suburban commuters who take the train to Grand Central Terminal in the morning and head home at night, according to data compiled by the railroad.
Shifts in regional employment patterns and a sustained effort by the railroad to attract new types of riders and fill underused trains are major reasons. A seat on Metro-North that once would have belonged almost exclusively to suburban stockbrokers and office workers may now be occupied by an immigrant home health aide heading to work in White Plains, a retiree from Chappaqua attending a Broadway matinee or a Bridgeport, Conn., resident going to work at an insurance office in Stamford.
It is not that there are fewer traditional suburb-to-Grand Central commuters; in fact, Metro-North’s ridership is higher than it has ever been in the system’s 23-year history. But other categories of riders have grown at a much higher rate, including reverse commuters traveling to jobs north of the city, riders traveling between suburbs and day-trippers on shopping or sightseeing trips.
Commuters to Grand Central made up 49.4 percent of total riders on the three Metro-North lines east of the Hudson River last year, according to Robert MacLagger, director of operations planning for the railroad.
That is down from 65.3 percent in 1984, the year after Metro-North took over commuter operations of Conrail in New York and Connecticut. The data does not include two smaller lines that Metro-North operates in Rockland and Orange Counties.
“It’s kind of a benchmark that shows what has been building over the last several years and demonstrates the way the region is changing: more job growth in the suburbs and more diverse commuting patterns,” said Christopher Jones, vice president for research at the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit organization that monitors transportation and development issues.
“Cities are still job centers, and Manhattan has held its own much more than a lot of other city centers across the country,” Mr. Jones said. “But we’ve become much more of a multicentered region. For the last two to three decades, jobs have been growing more quickly in the suburbs than they have within the five boroughs.”
The number of jobs in Westchester, Putnam and Dutchess Counties grew by 10.1 percent from 1997 to 2005, an increase of almost 51,000 jobs, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the same period, employment in New York City grew by 7.2 percent, an increase of more than 241,000 jobs.
Overall ridership on the region’s two other main railroad systems, the Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit, is still dominated by workers headed to Manhattan, although an expansion in other types of riders has been noted on those lines as well.
Even on Metro-North, suburban commuters to Manhattan still fill about two-thirds of the seats on weekdays. But with the growth of other kinds of riders, including riders on weekends, those traditional commuters now contribute less than half the annual tally, Mr. MacLagger said.
Last year, 35.9 million one-way trips were logged by suburban commuters who bought monthly and weekly passes for travel on Metro-North to and from Grand Central Terminal, a 17 percent increase over the 30.6 million such trips recorded in 1984.
But other types of travel on the railroad grew much faster during the same period. The biggest percentage growth was among reverse commuters, whom the railroad defines as people who travel north from stations in Manhattan or the Bronx during the morning rush. One-way trips taken by reverse commuters more than quadrupled, to 4.5 million in 2005 from 1 million in 1984. In 1984, reverse commuters made up roughly 2 percent of Metro-North riders. Now they make up more than 6 percent.
The biggest group of riders after traditional commuters is made up of what the railroad calls discretionary riders, those who travel during off-peak hours for reasons other than work. In 1984 they accounted for a quarter of all riders; now they represent nearly a third.
And the number of workers traveling between suburban stations has nearly tripled and now makes up 13.5 percent of total trips.
“Going back to the mid-90’s, we started concentrating on those areas where we had capacity and the opportunity to grow market share,” said Peter A. Cannito, the president of Metro-North, the nation’s second-largest commuter railroad, after the Long Island Rail Road. He said the railroad had increased service, bought new rail cars and spent money to promote weekend excursions and the convenience of train travel for reverse commuters who might have been inclined to drive.
The trend at Metro-North is similar to rider patterns on the Long Island Rail Road. In 1985, 70 percent of Long Island riders used a monthly or weekly ticket, predominantly for traditional commuting from the eastern suburbs into New York City, according to data provided by the Long Island Rail Road. Today that figure has dropped to 60 percent.
New Jersey Transit estimates that 58 percent of its ridership this year will be made up of commuters traveling during the weekday rush hour, most of those bound for Manhattan.
The depth of the changes on Metro-North was evident during a morning weekday visit of several hours to the Fordham station, at East Fordham Road and Third Avenue in the Bronx. The northbound platform for trains to places like White Plains, Chappaqua, New Rochelle and Greenwich was usually jammed with well over 100 people.
The opposite platform, for trains bound for Grand Central Terminal, was virtually deserted by comparison. Part of the reason was that taking the subway is cheaper.
The station is Metro-North’s fourth busiest, behind Grand Central, Stamford and White Plains, but in contrast to those stations, a suit and tie is a rarity there. Instead, there are construction workers in boots and blue jeans, factory workers in comfortable shoes and home health aides in uniforms. Rider tallies show that northbound passenger boardings at Fordham during the morning rush rose to more than 3,400 people a day last year compared with 500 people a day in 1984.
Christine Soto of the Bronx was waiting for a train to White Plains, where she works three days a week as a dental assistant. Ms. Soto also attends John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. On Metro-North trains she often has to stand during the 17- to 31-minute ride to and from work, she says. On the subway to and from school she almost always gets a seat.
“The D train is actually less crowded than the Metro-North,” Ms. Soto said.