The most recent transit-and-jobs “Access Across America” report came out this week and here’ s the latest map. It’s a heat map showing “jobs within a 30 minute transit ride” of any given location on the map. Blues are 0-5K, greens are about 10-50K, and yellows and oranges denote 100-500K jobs. (Other cities have even higher numbers of jobs within a short transit ride.)
By comparison, check out the 2015, 2016, and 2017 maps which were also on display here on streets.mn.
Here’s what the UMN researchers had to say about the latest updates to the maps:
According to the latest data, the Minneapolis metropolitan area ranks 13th nationally in access to jobs by transit, unchanged from 13th in last year’s rankings. The study reports that the average worker in the Minneapolis metro can reach 18,029 jobs within 30 minutes traveling by transit. Overall, workers in the metro can reach an average of 7.0 percent more jobs by transit than a year ago, the 9th highest change in transit accessibility among the metropolitan areas we analyzed. Total employment in the metro area has increased slightly to nearly 1.8 million jobs.
“These results reflect many factors. Perhaps the most significant change in the local transit system between January 2016 and January 2017 was the opening of service on the Metro Transit A Line,” said Andrew Owen, director of the Observatory. “Our analysis indicates that A Line service played an important role in driving the overall increase in transit accessibility, along with an increase in overall regional employment. Route and schedule changes throughout the transit network all contribute to accessibility changes as well, but it is difficult to isolate specific contributions.”
Twin Cities currently ranks 13th nationally, well behind Denver and Seattle. That’s not that great, IMO, probably because we are still a very suburban and spread-out metro area compared to many other US cities. If we funded the planned aBRT lines, which offer significant speed improvements for well-used buses, the Twin Cities could really increase our ranking.