Cities Where People Travel the "Wrong Way" to Work (and Why)
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When you think of commuting, you probably think of people traveling from the suburbs to the central city. Today we'll talk about why this is an oversimplified idea, why it might be a BAD idea, and we'll look at ten city-suburb pairs that flip the script.
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Resources:
- US Census Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics O-D data from onthemap.ces.census.gov/
- visitaddison.com/tourism
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- www.ridemcts.com/routes-sched...
- www.soundtransit.org/system-e...
- metrolinktrains.com/globalass...
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- Phoenix Valley Metro RTP Transit Brochure vulcan-production.nyc3.cdn.di...
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Yeah, but we cannot bash each other with comments on Nebula. I watch it there and come back here for the fun 🥳
Nebula needs community involvement. No forums and discussion kinda sucks.
I am a Nebula member, but usually watch on KZhead (Premium member, so no ads). Does Nebula also pay by view? Is it more valuable for you if I watch here or on Nebula?
That's not a business model that's going to work in the long run. I'm all for paying creators (Premium member here, albeit that pays very little, I know), but no business model (especially streaming) has ever lasted forever, there's been 100s, and they all struggle, there's not a financial institution that will be able to do this unless they grow their audience to KZhead Proportions, and you don't do that by charging 300 bucks upfront no matter how lifetime its supposed to be, it's just a doomed business model from the getgo. I do however wish you and other creators the best of luck, maybe I'm wrong, who knows?
I guessed Detroit to Dearborn Michigan would be the number because that is where all the automobile related factories are.
"Los Angeles isn't a real city, it's a just a large collection of suburbs connected by freeways" being proven correct once again.
it's like the universe: it's centerless. also, it's the densest urban area in the US
The issue is with the city planning and zoning. Most of those “suburbs” should all be changed to high density zones. It would solve much of the housing crisis while also increasing density. Nobody takes public transportation in LA because it’s unsafe, dirty, and unreliable. If housing density increased 10x, it would turn into something more like NYC, but nobody wants that.
@alquinn8576 where'd you find your numbers cause everything I'm finding is pointing to the more obvious NYC, then Philly, then Chicago, and then LA
@@CrushedFemur I think he's talking about the metropolitan area, not the city itself
@@dandreflowers7435 urban area, not metropolitan area; see wikipedia: "List of United States urban areas" it should be noted at differing scales and thresholds, different locations are "denser" than others. It's a bit like the fractal problem of measuring the length of a coastline.
I used to reverse commute from NYC to Stamford, CT for about 3 years. I moved from the suburbs into NYC because that's where all my social life was, but I maintained my job in Stamford. Every year I would notice more and more people on the MetroNorth going in the same direction as me, so it was clearly a popular option.
Enough people do that that Metro North started charging morning peak fares in both directions.
@@zoicon5Interesting! When I was doing it in the mid-2010's they only charged peak fare in the morning but regular fare in the evening. Didn't matter for me either way because I got the monthly pass every month
I do the exact same. I’m actually originally from Stamford but I have more fun in NYC
I expected Stamford or White Plains but while the overall # of reverse commuters is probably high, the excess isnt
@@zoicon5Metro North is expensive during regular hours. Peak fares are just crazy. Might as well just drive.
Former Microsoft employee who’s lived in Seattle and commuted to Redmond here: Microsoft has a massive number of private buses that stop all over Seattle to pick up employees and drive them to Redmond. They were usually very near or over capacity, so many many employees take mass transit to work. You could even get work done on the way as they had pretty reliable WiFi. Also a great excuse to not have to stay working late “sorry boss, last bus for my stop leaves at 6:30, gotta leave”
The 545 and 542 are also nice transit buses until the light rail opens. I think the 545 is the highest ridership ST route
The Redmond campus also has massive parking lots for people who drive.
I always see these busses in Cap hill.
It *is* amusing that paying one or two drivers to run a late route is an unjustifiable expense vs the "massive productivity" gained by working in the office. Senior management runs on vibes, you'd think.
@@timgerk3262 Management needs someone to manage and they'll pay money for that power trip.
The beauty of the Los Angeles area is there are so many little nodes and clusters of employment all over this giant canvas of concrete, so we get to enjoy traffic in all directions all the time!
I commute from LA to Santa Monica. I can tell you it does NOT feel like a reverse commute. That is some of the worst traffic on the Westside.
Just recently did a 2 hour drive from Orange County to Los Feliz. No more friends, not worth it.
Maximum efficiency of infrastructure!
I get off work at 9:30pm every night and commute from Santa Monica to DTLA via the 10 frwy and it’s still heavy traffic that time of night. LA is truly dense.
Meanwhile my country has promoted decentralization to free up more office space downtown (& fight it's rising rents) which has led to some employers moving out of downtown to satellite towns. Which is good if you stay in a suburb on the same side of town as the satellite town but bad if you stay on the opposite site, necessitating you to commute cross-country to work, though also increasing reverse commuting & evening out the travel demand in both directions of public transport services
I reverse commuted on the Metra BNSF line for five years. People asked why I didn’t move closer to work, and I was like “I’m not going to move to Illinois as a 22 year old and not live in Chicago!” It’s pretty awesome that Metra has reverse direction express trains. Pretty rare for an American city
I live in a suburb directly next to Chicago, my apartment is about 300 feet from union pacific west line and green line and half a mile from the blue line, I take metra out to the farther suburbs all the time to visit family and friends, and green line to work. all the transit in Chicagoland with the cheap prices compared to any other us city with decent transit is such a plus
Did that once as well. Unfortunately, before the reverse express trains but fortunately negotiated working from the train so I got to physically arrive at the office 930ish and leave 4ish. My thoughts were the same as your's - even as a 40yo.
BART runs reverse express trains solely for the purpose of getting the equipment back to the end of the line as quickly as possible so they can run another peak direction trip
If you can't work within walk/bike range, reverse commuting is pretty sweet.
and you get to flip off everyone stuck standstill on the wrong side of the bridge lol
The reason LA is so car-dependent: Their original mass transit system was bought by a private company co-owned by General Motors, Firestone Tires and large concrete- and asphalt-production companies. They bought it for the express purpose of shutting it down and forcing Angelinos to use their products. This actual historical event was parodied in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," but it actually happened in real life first.
@luke5100funnily enough, I think Donut Media (a car channel based in LA) did a video on this years ago. Edit; video is titled “did big oil kill public transit in LA?”
As a kid: “Haha funny cartoon live action movie” As an adult “Look at what they did with my boy”
This isn't really true. The city sprawled along the streetcar lines, which were slow and uncomfortable. By the time National City Lines started buying up streetcar companies people had largely moved to buses - or cars. Google "LA streetcar conspiracy" to learn more about the true history.
What a load of lies. The Trans were private, created by developers to sell homes far away. Once the home sold, the trams were basically insolvent, and cities who took them over nearly went bankrupt. the maintenance was too high and buses were cheaper. Trams were killed because they were a solution looking for a problem.
I'm a reverse commuter! I take the bus or train from the center of town to the industrial area in a suburb about 8 km away. Takes 15 minutes by car, 15+10 by foot and train, and 15+30 by foot and bus. Bus is rammed with kids going to school outside the city, hospital workers, and my colleagues. Train is very quiet, but it relies on a shuttle connection that the company funds. It's also in aerospace.
Feels like aerospace jobs are always going to be near an airfield, which is almost always in the burbs
@@CityNerd I worked in Aerospace in a suburb of Toronto. It would be quite interesting to see if you added Toronto to this list. Inbound and outbound should be massively different.
Redmond Washington might be worth a video at some point as an example of how formerly sparse suburbs can densify. Downtown redmond has been building a lot of dense housing and a bunch of new bars and restaurants have sprung up as a result. All the tech money helps of course but its’s been really encouraging to watch the city start to come alive in the last decade
Redmond and Totem Lake are two areas that I spent a lot of time in as a little kid in the 2000s that are just completely unrecognizable now. The growth in the last 10 years is unreal.
Yeah I kind of poked fun at Redmond in the video but it's a perfectly pleasant place to visit, and Marymoor Park is a gem
I have only had reverse commutes as I like living in a city, but work in manufacturing. The only places new factories really open out are in suburbs or exurbs. I have worked at one in the downtown of a small town, that had train tracks to the factory, but those tracks were no longer used. I would love to be able to reasonably commute to work via a method besides driving. I know there are a couple of oddballs that are still around.
The medieval agricultural model is being reiterated. Living in villages and going out to the fields, orchards, etc. as needed. Now the "fields" are low density industrial office parks on the outskirts of town.
I work in the environmental field and you get a lot of people wanting to live in the city, but naturally much of the work is out in the exurbs and natural areas. Lots of reverse commuting in my field.
property values plummet outside of city cores, it really isn't out of the question to rent a room or buy a studio near the industrial park during the work week and go home to the city during the weekends. industrial parks are inefficient to serve with only transit because the occupant density is so, so low. Industrial parks really need bike connectivity if you want a usable alternative to driving.
same as a construction manager I often have to commute to field offices outside chicago as well, though it will still be around 40 min for a 20 mile radius by car. wish there were more metra options
I was thinking about this too. Especially in the Boston area, since most of the engineering jobs are located in suburbs, but I'd guess that a lot of their workforce is younger and is choosing to live in the city. I also know a lot of people who live in NYC and commute on Metro North to Connecticut for work.
Another interesting phenomenon is higher suburb to suburb commutes than suburb to city commutes. For example, the inner belt of Cleveland (I90) doesn't really experience dead lock congestion unless there is an accident. Meanwhile I480, the outerbelt that goes through the suburbs, is so congested that it's faster to use the stroads, at least during rush hour.
Only about 1/6th of the people in the Cleveland metro area actually live in the city. In the Detroit area, the fraction is even lower. We should expect a lot more activity outside the central cities than inside.
Minneapolis/St Paul is similar. Lots of big employers such as 3M and Thompson Reuters are in the burbs.
San Diego is fairly similar as well
Toronto also has a lot of suburb-to-suburb commutes in addition to city/reverse-city commutes, and one reason why Highway 401 is the busiest freeway in the world. I once worked at my own suburban city and 90% of the employees in my department commuted from a different suburb (the other 10% lived in the city itself)
The other reason Scottsdale doesn't have much in the way of public transit is because enough of the residents are profoundly opposed to anything that would allow Those People* to come there that they've been able to vote and/or lobby down transit initiatives. * Some of them mean "The Poors," some of them have...other criteria in mind.
In other words, Arizona strikes again?
Yeah that pisses me off u are in the service area. Ur no transportation because narcissists Karen is who matters
I used to work in Scottsdale and a few years ago they had proposed extending the light rail. I had a client a complain to me that they shouldn’t build it because it’d be an eyesore. Part of my job was to drive this woman to the grocery store less than a mile away so that she could get her pastries and lunch meat for the week. She was never going to go near where the light rail would be for her to be worried about the view.
Cities can exist w/o suburbs, but suburbs can't exist w/o cities? Boy does Florida disagree
Back in my grad school days, I was playing with OnTheMap for NYC data, and I came across that NYCDOE sets all their employees (approximately 135k) at a single site in downtown Brooklyn, and conversely had no employees at their 1,700+ schools. I wonder if something similar is happening with #8 between Nashville and Berry Hill, with all of their employee information tied to an office in Berry Hill, instead of distributed across Nashville.
Exactly my thought. This would make a ton of sense if the dataset had coded every Metro Nashville school employee -- teachers, maintenance staff, etc. -- as working in Berry Hill. Do we actually know these "reverse commutes" have ever happened?
Agreed, this also happens with other companies that have a HQ and Satellite locations
Oh yeah!!! Because I struggled to imagine where you would fit 12,000 or so employees in that town. I suspect there's a goood chance that's exactly what it is
I noticed that Paris was pretty centerless, and that actually worked quite well, including with transit. No overcrowded rundown center. Get from anywhere to anywhere with one change of lines, because every line seemed to cross every other two places in long arcs. More consistent use of lines, rather than trains being full near the center and empty toward the ends. Equal use both directions. Centers are not so good for urbanism, despite the zeal for them. London is another example of a fairly centerless city. Sure, there's a density gradient, but not to a single central point.
IMO Paris just has a huge center. The city itself and La Defense basically.
Paris is the center of France, and unfortunately it's not a good thing for trains
Though Montreal has a LOT of "typical" North-American commuting, for a year or so my commute was the opposite and it was fantastic. I lived a 10 minute walk from the central station downtown, and worked a 2 minute walk from one station away from there. Thousands upon thousands of people getting off at this central terminus station, for me to get on and have an entire train car to myself, and the same on the return home. Luxurious.
Careful with employment statistics and school district headquarters like in the Berry Hill example! What happens in some datasets is that all teachers and/or support staff are attributed to the admin HQ location for work and not the individual school's location.
I was gonna say, this is probably what's driving that unusual statistic
This plus the fact that Berry Hill is a bit of an anomaly in general as it's not a suburb as much as it's a town that didn't incorporate with the rest of Nashville/Davidson County Metro (along with Lakewood, which was eventually dissolved... by one vote and, I think, Forest Hills).
@@MalachiBrown ya fr why is berry hill it’s own city
@@MalachiBrown Franklin cool springs would be better for this list
That's not even to mention Vanderbilt 100 oaks is right there, which is the largest "off Campus" clinical site for Vanderbilt
The glaring issue I see with the idea of "reverse commute" would be that rents are rediculously high in the city, while jobs in the suburbs are going to pay (at least theoretically) according to the cost of living of the suburbs, not the city. So really only a very select number of people could live in the city and commute to the suburbs. Maybe this could be part of a critique of landlords, property values or some such, but the cost of living is central to the discussion, I feel.
Valid observation. From what I have seen, only higher paying jobs in the suburbs attract workers from the city. Typically, jobs in healthcare, higher education and upper management are the main reverse commuter jobs.
See e.g. the effects highly paid tech workers in Redmond drove up housing costs in Seattle. To make matters worse, those same people carry a lot of political influence, which makes it hard for a city to revise zoning to allow higher density housing. To its credit, Seattle has enacted slightly more liberal regulations around ADUs, but it can still be a huge uphill battle, if possible at all, to replace single-family detached housing with mid-rise condos/apartments in Seattle neighborhoods.
This happens a lot in southern San Francisco neighborhoods, where it is very expensive to rent there, because people want that San Francisco atmosphere but they work in silicon valley, and make the commute. Kind of annoying when there's already a market of people looking for apartments because the city itself has its own job market
It really depends on the city. "affordable urbanism cities" typically have higher unemployment, the latter of which would naturally cause people who live in the city to possibly make a reverse commute work. Providence is an example of an affordable city with high unemployment, so some RI residents will commute to suburban/exurban massachusetts for jobs that both pay better and are more likely to hire them.
I think you are correct in the assessment of this mainly being about better paying jobs, but I’d say the cause is a bit more complicated then just city living being expensive. It’s quite well researched people in more specialized (and therefore usually better paid) roles have longer commutes on average, because they have a much more limited job pool. Moving to a suburb, because that’s where you’re job is can be an option, but especially if you aren’t sure how long you’ll stay there it might make more sense to live in a central location. For less specialized jobs people will often be able to find a job wherever they already live, so they have less pressure to commute out of town or even move for a job. You of course get a problem if those local jobs don’t pay enough for the area they are in, which sadly is much more common then it should be.
I wanted to see Chicago on this list. But then thinking about how Metra focuses so heavily on peak direction trips, and how the CTA so intensely focuses it's rail system on downtown, I am not surprised at all to not see us on here. Having the suburbs be split into hundreds of municipalities instead of a few larger ones probably doesn't help either
Also, O’Hare is considered to be within the city itself, rather than Rosemont or another adjacent suburb.
I thought for sure Rosemont would be on here considering the massive trench of office buildings I-90 runs through, Allstate Arena, Big 10 headquarters, the shopping, the hotels, the restaurants. And only 4,000 live in the city, so the ratio must be crazy even if most of the workforce comes from other suburbs.
Deerfield, Northfield, Schaumburg, Oak Brook, North Chicago (Abbott)
Rosemont is positioned at the nexus of enough different highways that I think it enables a serious flow of commuters from every direction. Because it's situated in the center of all these suburbs, it makes sense that there's a pretty wide range of commute origins for Rosemont workers. But yeah yeah I think you were hinting at that and I would be super curious to see the numbers on where everyone who works in Rosemont comes from @@Zooropa_Station
Really surprised Rosemont didn't make it on the list. Don't know anyone that's lived in Rosemont, but tons of people from the city live there.
Growing up in Burbank, I can confirm the hour long walk to the closest metro station kinda ruled out that option if I ever wanted to go downtown and have time to actually do anything there
Dude felt I live near a park and ride system in houston and I don't use it to get to school (university of houston) despite it being about 11 miles down the free way because I have to switch busses 4- 5 times and takes an hour an half. 😬 so I use my car instead bus because what is that 🥲
@@jeremiasiraheta5471Another winning moment for transit in Texas.
I live in Cleveland and commute to a suburb; Ironically, part of why I chose the city proper was to be less car dependent, but it would take me over 2 hours each way if I tried to take a bus to work. I'm also constantly frustrated that if I need to do some in-person shopping, I basically have to go to a "lifestyle center" in the 'burbs. The only shopping to be done in the city is largely very niche specialty stores that have odd hours and aren't located near each other (don't get me wrong, if I need a pizza-shaped bike bag, a dog-shaped planter, or some curated '80's fashion, I have some cool places to go, I love those shops. But if I just need a bra and some jeans...), and the downtown "mall" is not worth going to.
That's something I've noticed I'm my downtown too, we have lots of great restaurants and a few specialty stores but there's no regular grocery stores or department stores to be found. We actually have neighborhoods within walking distance of my downtown as well as a couple of apartments so it's surprising to me nobody has capitalized on the the demand.
All the Los Angeles ones are easy to explain: The San Fernando Valley looks like a suburb in that it's filled with single family houses, but is technically part of the city of Los Angeles. So all the smaller cities in the area that have more workplaces than housing end up full of Valley residents working there. Not really a "reverse commute" though in the real world.
True. This video is kinda dumb
I still remember one of the BC government's COVID restriction announcements that featured reverse commuting: "For example, if you live in Vancouver and work in Surrey, you can continue to commute"
Wow I'd never heard of that as part of a COVID strategy, interesting
@@CityNerd It was just an example, it wasn't saying only reverse commuting was allowed lol
Huge respect for pronunciation of El Segundo. I knew you were thorough with your research, but this confirms how dedicated you are to getting even the smallest stuff correct.
But then he BUTCHERED his pronunciation of Wilshire. It's spelled "Will-Shire" but any LA native pronounces it "Will-Shure".
@@PASH3227I feel like "shire"-suffixed place names in England are all pronounced "sure" as well
@@Randomdive More like "shai-er" (ʃaɪər). US pronounciation is like, "Shy-r" (ʃaɪr).
I lost my wallet in El Segundo
Everyone talks about El Segundo and I'm always asking what about El Primero?
"Cities can exist without suburbs. But suburbs... just by definition, can't really exist without cities." I'm putting that in my pocket 👍
Why not? Some cities pretty much are giant suburbs (Phoenix). And Detroit has been running the experiment of 'what happens if almost everybody moves out of the central city?' For about 75 years now.
@@markweaver1012 Detroit is massively committing to bringing homes back downtown. Redevelopment projects abound.
@@markweaver1012 Phoenix still has a downtown. It's not great, but it has skyscrapers.
@@markweaver1012 how'd that experiment pan out exactly?
@@markweaver1012 Like was quoted suburbs can't exist without a city *by definition.* If a suburban type environment exists without being attached to a core urban area it's called an exurb.
The Erewhon SoCal locations were killing me 😂😂😂😂😂
I expected Orlando to Kissimmee may have made the list - all of the theme park employees and tourists heading out every day.
I thought of this too, but I think that since the parks are in Bay Lake/Lake Buena Vista (population: 53) there wouldn't be enough data to compare people who commute from RCID to Orlando.
Local Nashvillian here! Berry Hill is interesting as it's more like a neighborhood of Nashville than a suburb. It is entirely surrounded by metro Nashville, but has a separate city government. I don't think it really fits in your video idea, as it really is just a subdivision of the city itself.
Same could be said about Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Culver City. Both are nearly entirely bound by LA.
Just because it's surrounded by the greater city doesn't mean it's not a suburb -- though to be honest, just because it's the greater city also doesn't mean it's urban. Plenty of suburban neighborhoods in the city of LA for example, which are probably the source for many of these commutes not the downtown core.
It’s so tiny, it is IN Nashville, it’s Nashville 🤷🏼♀️
@@szurketaltos2693 berry hill is not a suburb tho, like it’s more urban than most the city and is completely surrounded by Nashville, no clue why it’s it’s own city, I forget sometimes
@brocksanders5135 if I remember correctly, when the city of Nashville and Davidson County merged their governments all the little municipalities besides berry hill decided to dissolve into the Nashville government.
Not surprised Los Angeles repeatedly shows up. The metro area is full of "city lines" people cross everyday. It's easy to commute in reverse by technical and real definition. I work freelance in the film industry so I never know where I will work. I live in a middle class LA neighborhood between Beverly Hills and Culver City roughly at the nexus of traffic, so I end up going against the grain. Sony (Culver), Manhattan Beach Studios (~El Segundo), Warner (Burbank), etc. The city is so sprawled, it's not an arm and a leg to live wherever is "central." And studios are fascinating, and increasingly secretive and secured. As mentioned, Sony's history and compactness makes it an especially compelling and nice place to work, kind of like a nice city.
I was expecting many La suburbs to show up on this list but I was surprised Irvine California didn't show up. Vernon and Commerce also have a bunch of factories so I'm sure they're a large "reverse commuter" destination too!
@@PASH3227 How funny: my girlfriend who lives with me unfortunately commutes to a factory in that miserable tax haven industrial area (Huntington Park), and before moving in with me, she commuted from Irvine.
LA is just 3 suburbs in a trench coat.
@@PASH3227 Having grown up in Irvine, I was also kind of expecting it to show up. Though after some further consideration, I think it probably acts more like a mini-city for the other surrounding suburbs rather than as a reverse commute destination for LA residents.
I used to commute to Burbank and the train schedule completely killed it as a viable option. Metrolink is supposed to be significantly increasing service, so hopefully it'll be better in the future.
I, too, used to commute to Burbank before my company moved to Glendale. It would take me about 2.5 hours to get there via bus from the SGV. Now it takes me about 2 hours in the morning and anywhere from an hour and change to over 2 hours at night, depending on when the bus shows up. I hate taking transit here but don't drive and couldn't afford to even if I did.
Missed opportunity to talk about reversible street design
Omaha NE has reversible lanes and they work quite well
San Diego has this on I-15.
The Golden Gate Bridge has movable median barriers that are shifted daily by a "zipper" truck. The bridge is four lanes into and two lanes out of the city during morning commute and two lanes into and four lanes out of the city during afternoon commute. Its three-and-three on weekends.
In additions to the many resorts, restaurants and stores, Scottsdale also includes the "Scottsdale Airpark" which has "approximately 64,130 employees, 47,312,296 square feet of buildings, and 3,326 companies".
My dad worked for the aerospace corporation, commuting from ventura county. We just considered it commuting to LA. It's government funded and does support work for NASA and the military. When I was little I had no conception that aerospace was a whole industry and not just a single company so when i would tell people my dad works for aerospace and they asked what company, I thought they were idiots or deaf.
Shanghai metro commuter here! Couple of fun facts: - Even tho Shanghai is one of the most wealthy provinces, car ownership is a bit below the median. It actually peaked around 2010 and then fell. - Shanghai does have suburbs and it's pretty evident that the government planned the city for most people to commute from the outskirts to the city center. Fortunately tho, they did not destroy (that many) old communities in the center for the sake of highways, so the heart of the city remains vibrant. Suburbs in China are still made of seas of tall buildings, not seas of single-family housing like the US, but the monotonicity still makes it very suburban. - Tho most outsiders awe at the sight of the tall modern buildings of Pudong, but living here you come to realize of how little market/social infrastructure there is on that side of the river, coz it's basically all suburbs. Most of the good stuff, businesses, bars, concert halls, theaters, museums, etc. are on the old side of the river
Toronto->Mississauga might have made the list. Same with Toronto->Brampton or maybe even Markham. There is no relief on the god-awful monstrosity that is the 401, in any direction, at any time.
so glad i work from home almsot exclusively. Cant stand cities...
@@StarFyreXXXthis channel is CityNerd, not "single-family home Stroadville Nerd" or "middle of bumf**k nowhere Nerd"
I used to do Toronto - Markham and Toronto - Vaughan
Also Downtown Toronto to North York Centre. Or Toronto to Hamilton (probably less common).
Were there any cities where the net reverse commuters to all surrounding suburbs were higher than inbound commuters to the central city? Might be interesting to see a part 2 on this.
Seems like that would cut against a sub-urban definition.
San Francisco?
The Boise metro area is getting close to this.
Nashville, Dallas. Austin, Louisville, Cincinnati, St. Louis are the areas with which I'm familiar for whom working in the central city is the exception. Quite honestly, I was under the impression that ship sailed twenty years ago. Why else are we organizing our central cities into pricey lifestyle centers with exorbitantly priced condos if that space wasn't already vacant?
@@lukethompson5558I admit to thinking SF, Berkeley, and Oakland might be at #1 on the list. Guess not!
I reverse commuted for a time from Center City Philadelphia to Cherry Hill, NJ. By bus, it was hell, because the bus stop was far from my house and only ran once an hour. Later, one of our sales guys who worked on the other side of Philly started picking me up. The drive was a breeze, of course, at least from my house near the Art Museum to Cherry Hill, since 95% of the traffic was headed into the city, and we were headed out.
I'm surprised Philly wasn't on the list at all. The feaking wage taxes alone drive entire industries to the suburbs.
Manhasset is kinda funny to me as someone who has a parent who reverse commutes there I never learned to drive and ended up working in the city and never feel any need to go to manhasset My sister did learn to drive and loves going to manhasset because of all the parking and swears the food “isn’t that bad”
I really enjoyed this comment! Food “isn’t too bad there”
I'm pretty sure the major draw for commuting to Manhasset is because of Northwell.
@@James_1337 pretty much!! (That’s where my parent works lol)
@@beatleplayer1011 I used to work to corporate! I'm surprised he focused on the retail in the area 🤷♂️
Your lists are well thought out and often use great data. Keep 'em coming!
“Whatever people do in suburbs …”. You are a character.
Harsh but true
Lived in Phoenix for years, your purple question mark area is a massive mountain range! Amazing hiking but pretty rough for transit…probably a good way to describe the layout of the city…hence why Chicago is the best!
LOL at the Aerospace Corporation joke. I used to work there, very funny.
Suspicious 🤔🤨
I reverse commute. I’m an engineer. Engineers working on a physical product reverse commute a lot because more land is required to manufacture products. Land is way more expensive in cities so it makes sense to develop outside of cities. I also think companies can get away with setting up shop outside of cities for engineers because they’re not as “social”.
I've been blessed with a reverse commute, living in San Francisco, but then working in the East Bay as a teacher (college) I've had schedules that were very commute friendly with virtually no traffic except the few areas where many things converge in a short area and there's "always traffic" there. Although my current job I do take BART because it's actually convenient to do so as I'm less than a half block from campus, and strangely enough cheaper (that usually isn't the case). I used to work in at school in San Francisco where I was 10 minutes away, that was the most ideal commute, but sometimes you go where the work is and the lack of permanency doesn't make moving closer to work a feasible thing at all.
In Philly, the city taxes chased companies out of the city and into the suburbs. The suburbs also offered tax incentives, and don't have a wage tax
I live in Redondo Beach, right by El Segundo, and I'm only ever using the C Line in the "wrong direction" compared to prevalent commuter flows, it's kind of a strange thing. Regardless, absolutely none of the C Line stations are particularly accessible by walking or by buses, it's kind of just a desert, either because of the 105 or the affluent suburbanites who will never use local bus services. In isolation, based on what it connects (Southeast LA to Downtown and Downtown to the South Bay), you'd expect it to have significantly more ridership than it actually does; it's the least used Metro Rail or Busway line besides the K Line, which goes nowhere.
Love this topic. Been waiting for a video on this for a while.
"You can't have suburbs without cities" Bella Vista, Arkansas would beg to differ!
A very large proportion of the people "commuting" from NYC to Manhasset are going to be retail employees for the mall stores and low wage hospital employees commuting from just across the city line, from Flushing, Bayside, Douglaston and Little Neck, and they are more likely to be taking the bus than they are the LIRR Port Washington line, because of cost. The public bus costs only $2.90 each way from Flushing/Main Street (IRT Flushing Line terminus, the "7" train). An LIRR one-way peak ticket from Flushing to Manhasset costs $8.75, and still leaves you off 2 miles from the mall. The monthly ticket costs $189.00.
off-peak (Flushing Main St to Manhasset) is $6.50 and is more relevant for most retail jobs
The Reverse Commutification of LA's Westside (Culver/Santa Monica/LA/BeverlyHills) is more accurately summer up as one region of LA than traditional Suburb travel. Getting past Beverly Hills eastbound or westbound at any time of day, but specifically Rush Hour is ROUGH. it's often easier to go down and around than thru.
Yes, Culver city, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Burbank are all independent cities in their own right
@@AD-mq1qj yes but the Westside operates as one unit of LA.
First commercial break in this video was for RAM pickups.
I lived in Midtown Atlanta in the 2000s and worked in Marietta and Kennesaw. The reverse commute was wonderful. When I had a bad day, on the drive home I could just look over at the thousands stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on I-75 while I was driving 75, and I would instantly feel better.
This is me now. Unfortunately, the connector has slow traffic going back into the city in the evening, but I definitely feel good looking at all the cars when I first depart my job.
We all commute into Scottsdale because minimum wage in AZ is still $12 an hour while the median home price in Scottsdale is 1 million
Doesn't explain Tempe, though. I think it's part of it, but also Phoenix itself is so sprawled and its downtown is relatively dead weight (seems like people mostly go there for stuff like sports and court hearings)
San Diego has some strange commuting patterns. There are a lot of jobs in the suburbs, but they are widely distributed. Suburb to suburb commutes are common enough for traffic to clog up in both directions during rush hour, and traffic into the center of San Diego tends to be miserable during the evening commute. I live in one of the suburbs north of San Diego, and I am fortunate enough to work at home, so I don't usually have to put up with the chaos. I find that if I want to go anywhere during the evening commute, I have to take a close look at the traffic map. Traffic might be bad heading toward San Diego, or it might be bad going between two suburbs at equal distances from San Diego. Interestingly, it is usually easy to get to Orange County during the evening commute, but it is impossible to get to Riverside County. Transit, of course, is inadequate throughout this region, and I am far too lazy and out of shape to ride a bike (and bike infrastructure is dreadful), so I am stuck with my car. Suburb to suburb commutes would be an interesting topic, but I bet researching it would not be easy.
It’s so weird! I work in UTC and live in mission hills and the traffic coming back into the city is always horrendous around 6pm, but completely fine going out of the city. It’s the opposite of what I would have thought, so strange.
Growing up in SD, and living now in LA, SD has always seemed like a confederation of suburbs with a tiny downtown rather than anything resembling a city. No wonder transit has always sucked there. LA feels like NYC in transit compared to SD.
It might be tough for SD to show up on this map because many of the major employment centers north of Downtown (UTC, Sorrento Valley, La Jolla, Miramar, Kearny Mesa, Carmel Valley/PQ) are in the city proper, even though they could reasonably be called suburbs. Sadly it’s a big problem for transit here because the jobs are so distributed.
I thought that too, but most of the SD "suburbs" with high employment, UTC, Sorrento, Kearny Mesa, are still in the city of SD.
@@coreyleblanc7088 This is true - San Diego is a large, spread out city that includes many suburbs within the city limits. Los Angeles also has a lot of suburbs within the city limits, and it would likely have even more reverse commutes on this list if they were separate cities. Taking this into account would make research of the type presented in this video a lot harder. Even so, there are many job centers outside of the city limits. For example, there is significant high tech employment in Oceanside and Carlsbad, and there are a lot of jobs in the suburbs inland from these cities. This contributes to the miserable east-west traffic in both directions along Highway 78 during rush hour. I live near the coast, and if I want to go to San Marcos after work, it can take up to an hour to get there, whereas during off-peak hours or on the weekend, it takes twenty minutes.
The Nashville - Berry Hill commute is primarily since any road to the giant suburbs of Brentwood and Franklin will lead through Berry Hill. Additionally, since so many old homes out there are being renovated, the contractor traffic in Berry Hill is incredible
I worked in El Segundo for 20+ years and although I walked to work and back, I was a rare exception. My walking commute went by two of the three green line light rail stations. They didn't see a tremendous amount of commuter use because the train didn't go where it should have in order to provide value (south into the beach cities, or to the airport). Recent changes have added airport connectivity, but I no longer live in the area.
I had to reverse commute from LA County to Orange County for a couple years and it was awful. Besides being far as hell the traffic was shit the whole way (and like many in LA, the OC is annoying in numerous ways). The Metrolink existed but was unusable for my commute (since it was reverse and also manufacturing so it was early). Maybe in the future when Metrolink plans to increase headways it wouldn't be as bad but still not ideal.
In Portland so many people commute to Beaverton. The city wasn’t designed for it
Because Portland is not business friendly
26 and 217 are 🤮 to drive on during rush hour.
I live in Boulder Colorado. The population is about 100,000 but 64,000 people commute into town every day. Over the years I had jobs outside town, doing the reverse commute. On my fast, easy commute you could always see the stop and go along with all the accidents from people driving too fast and close. My last six years, I commuted downtown by bike and bus. The was definitely the best.
Thanks for the Wauwatosa shout out! They came to mind right away but wasn't sure if the volume would be high enough to make the top ten. AND for recognizing that the long-awaited first BRT of the Milwaukee County Transis System indeed funnels people to the Milwaukee County Medical Complex in Tosa.
9:22 Scottsdale Road was considered an eligible corridor in that map. Also, the map is a bit outdated, as there are plans in the work to build another light rail line in west Phoenix, along Indian School, and the ideas to build light rail along the 101 seem to have been abandoned.
Yeah Scottsdale Road is the easy solution if you ignore most of the golf courses / resorts (would probably need buses). One long line!
So the LA cases are kinda weird because Burbank, for example, is surrounded by LA in multiple sides, as is Beverley hills. El Segundo is named after the refinery (the second in California for standard oil) so it started as an employment center not a bedroom community, much like Vernon and Industry. BTW in the Barbie movie, the Mattel headquarters is in Century City, not downtown. That’s part of the joke. The reason the expo line is so convenient to the studio location in Culver City is that it’s a revival of the original street car line connecting the west side to downtown.
Babe wake up, a new CityNerd video just dropped.
This video was interesting! I looked up my town using the On The Map tool and one thing I noticed about the primary work places is that they didn't always match the actual physical location of the person's job. For example, I work for the city, so my employer's address is City Hall, but I commute to a completely different building. Another pip on the map with high employment looked like it was in a dead zone, until I realized that's the address of the district office for our county's public school system - so everyone who works for a school has that listed as their employer rather than the individual schools they commute to. For other employers like the colleges, hospitals, or industry areas, those employees probably do commute to those places... but I wonder what percentage of the population remote work or commute to somewhere other than their employer's official address.
The public transit for Seattle to Redmond is pretty bad but the larger tech employers run their own commuter bus service from Seattle. Which isn't helping mass transit in the region but at least it cuts down on individual car rides.
I love using On The Map. Such a fun and comprehensive use of data 🙂
Also, having been a Transportation Commissioner in Tempe for three years, I can tell you two things: 1 - a huge portion of the university commuters are coming on ASU's own inter-campus shuttle buses, which run every 15 mins, are free with a university ID, & stop relatively close to Valley Metro connections, but maddeningly aren't coordinated with any of those other services in terms of trip planning or ridership data analysis. 2 - there has in fact been a significant amount of work done on light rail &/or BRT from Scottsdale to both Tempe & Uptown Phoenix, including multiple corridor studies along Rural Rd & Camelback Rd dating back to at least 2008. The problem with a direct Scottsdale - Downtown connection is actually just the fact that it would run diagonal to the 1-mile arterial grid, so most of the planning is either due N/S or E/W. The Camelback BRT should be getting funded in the Prop 400 extension, but Idk the status of that.
I live downtown and used to reverse commute, it was great, there is a college out near my office so that would create the bulk of the other commuters so summer was extra quiet. The one variable is that the afternoon commute back to downtown is shared with anyone who is traveling in for entertainment.
Universities and education in general are huge contributors to reverse commuting. I'm in the Boise metro area and almost 70% of education workers commute out from Boise every day. It takes away steady jobs from the outer communities that need the employment base. Kinda sad to see.
A lot of "bedroom" suburbs have huge numbers of jobs for people to work at nowadays. In the Pittsburgh area, I thought it was surprising that Cranberry Township has more people coming into their community for work than residents commuting elsewhere. But I don't think it could make your list, because most of the people that work there come from other suburbs and not the city.
whether you reverse commute or conventional commute, the important thing to remember is to always live EAST of where you work. That way you have the sun at your back going in and then again the sun at your back going home. Unless you are a bike commuter and then you have to study the prevailing winds in your area - there will often be a general trend of onshore flow in the morning and then an offshore flow in the afternoon. You will always have a tailwind!
I commuted from downtown DC to Springfield VA for almost 4 years. It's about 14 miles. I'd be doing the speed limit all the way there on 395. I had a young child and there were much cheaper daycare options available in the suburbs. That was a real bonus. Going home was smooth until you got to the 14th street bridge. My office was in an industrial park. There was even an express Metrobus from Pentagon to my office door. In the DMV, there lot of people that commute from the city to places like Arlington, Bethesda, and Tysons.
My girlfriend did an internship for my mom in a suburb outside of Boston, and we ended up living closer to Boston and reverse commuting to the suburb, the traffic was always in our favor which was very convenient!
I was fully expecting to see Waltham, MA on this list
@@greenaldergaming8896 We actually lived in Waltham and commuted to Sudbury
@@SaxPanther The REVERSE reverse suburban commute 😄
I reverse commute to Redmond from Seattle. Their rail system is pretty lacking but their express bus system works very well in my experience.
I did the same but Bellevue to Seattle and I found the express bus from the Park and Ride was amazingly easy to use and with the dedicated bus lane across the I-90 it was just a quick as driving. Ironically ST ripped up the bus lanes for the Eastside light rail project didn't extend the light rail to the Eastagte park and ride. It turned a 25-30 minute commute into a 1 hour and 10 minutes commute with the light rail.
Yeah, I noticed that what rail they have is based heavily around the idea that everyone will commute into Seattle in the morning and out in the evening, with very little reverse commute service.
My reverse commuting experience was more about timing, I worked 2nd/3rd shift for a few years and always enjoyed a clear road ahead of me.
I did this for about a year and a half....about 30 miles each way....from a more established suburb to an exurb in a more rural area. So I would be commuting opposite against traffic and really wasn't a bad drive. Plus I was commuting in a Chevy Volt so I was able to leverage the car's EV mode to save on fuel.
Manhasset is the HQ for Northwell Health, which is the largest private employer in NYS.
I reverse commute from Portland, OR to Vancouver, WA on public transit. Kind of sucks since the MAX extension to Vancouver seems like it could take another 20 years and the bus commute is sub par, and I'm paying Oregon income tax while working in WA (which doesn't have income tax). BUT! I get to live in Portland and not in Vancouver. Just judging by the fact i am usually one of only a handful of people on my bus, seems like this is NOT a trend LOL.
Vancouver thankfully has been doing a lot of work in the Downtown/Uptown neighborhoods to make them more walkable and desirable places to live. The city government has been spearheading a lot of awesome projects to improve bike and pedestrian infrastructure as well. Helped with my decision to choose to live up here a lot easier without giving up on a lot of urban amenities I had down in Portland.
@@a1011000 yeah…unfortunately as someone who’s entire social life is in portland and does not have a car it’s not really feasible for me to move. also i’m pretty entrenched in the portland music and bike scenes so i’m happy to stay here for now
@@a1011000Finally! Downtown Vancouver hasn't been an interesting place since I-5 was built, maybe longer. My mother lived there in the late 1930's and was so happy when her family moved to Portland. 😄
Reverse commuter living in Richmond Virginia here that's fallen in love with your videos! I'm a teacher and musician so I live in the city because I like urbanism :)
11:52 We have great express buses. Route 550 goes to and from Seattle to Bellevue via I-90, Route 545 goes to and from Seattle to Redmond via 520, and route 542 goes to and from U District to Redmond via 520. East Link (2 Line) opens on April 27th!
There is no walkability once you get off of the C-Line in El Segundo.
I’ll never forget the caravans of private Wi-Fi enabled buses ferrying tech workers from downtown SF to their corporate campus in Silicon Valley. It was obscene as it mind as well have been a big middle finger to all the non tech workers who had to drive.
In my 3 years since graduating college I’ve reverse commuted from north seattle to Tulalip, Bellevue, and now Everett and many of my colleagues have done the same. I work in the environmental field so you probably have a higher share of people wanting to live in the city but much of the work is in the further suburbs, exurbs, and natural areas.
Ideally I’d like to walk or bike to work or even take transit but driving is mostly necessary. Reverse commuting and seeing all the big backups going the other way is always a little treat 😂
Had to watch this because most of the people in the bedroom community I live in have to commute half an hour to work in a larger city but many teachers at the local school actually commute in from that exact city.
Sir, there ARE great suburbs to be found. Addison will be one once the DART Silver Line opens -- take a closer look at Addison Circle. Kentlands/Lakelands in Gaithersburg MD is another one, even though it lacks rail service. There are countless great suburbs in the northeast centered around rail stations. Orenco Station in Hillsboro OR is certainly an outstanding one you should be aware of! Tualatin is quite charming and is now served by TriMet's WES line. Prairie Crossing in the distant reaches of Chicagoland is served by TWO METRA routes and is centered around an agricultural operation. Aggie Village in Davis CA has a lot of interesting features, including the "Impossible Acres" farm. You just need to look a little harder. 😁
I used to do a light version of this before I went work-from-home, and it was great. Invariably the other direction while commuting would be entirely backed up, but my direction was clear most of the time.
The “second”, or “Él Segundo” Chevron refinery. It’s actually a nice little town within the greater Los Angeles metro area. Yes, LAX is down there, but so is the regional wastewater treatment plant, and two important electric generating plants - one for the City of Los Angeles and the other for the SCE system. Quite important for voltage control… El Segundo is an important military town.
Baltimore not mentioned... RIP Key Bridge
I cannot believe you would talk about Las Vegas transit without mentioning Elon Musk's INCREDIBLE Tesla Loop system. By far the most advanced transportation system in the world today!
In Manchester (UK) the trains that brought the commuters into work then bring the holidaymakers out of the city to the coast. Then in the afternoon they brought returning holiday makers (the ones from the previous week) back home before picking up the commuters in the evening. The seat occupancy rate is pretty good, compared with London where most of the suburban trains are empty for most of the day because there's no leisure flow to balance out the peaks (London Underground remains well used throughout however, thanks to tourist traffic within the city).
Talking about the traffic disparities between sides of the road reminded of the reversible lanes on the Kennedy in Chicago.
Great video! Reverse commuting is my life lol, as I commute via train or car from Los Angeles to Fullerton. I'm not surprised to see all the SoCal cities listed here, as reverse commuting is what many strive for out here. Although the MetroLink frequencies are annoying, I'm thankful to be able to get from LA to Fullerton by rail and bus in around an hour.
I just want to share some more context for the Los Angeles area cities. A lot of people don't realize that if you look at the actual boundaries of the city of Los Angeles, a lot of it is actually fairly low density residential. Other than downtown, USC, and a few other hotspots, there's not actually a dense concentration of jobs in Los Angeles. In contrast, a lot of the surrounding cities like Santa Monica, Glendale, El Segundo, Long Beach, Burbank, and Pasadena, are all independent cities that for the most part are able to afford operating by themselves due to their strong independent economies (and thereby, jobs). A lot of people don't realize that "LA" as it's colloquially known is just a collection of dozens of cities. Another way to look at it is the populations. Los Angeles County has nearly 10 million people, but the City of Los Angeles only has a population of about 3.5 million. It shows that most of the people who live in the LA area aren't actually residents of Los Angeles.
Live in Seattle by my job takes me to Fife (near Tacoma) I admit find it as amusing as it is sympathizing when all I see on the opposite highway every day is back-to-back congestion, while I could practically have all four lanes to myself going to work in the morning and then going home in the afternoon.
I love reverse commuting. And thanks to your channel, I officially started trying at least once a week to swing taking it by transit only 😁
I have reverse commuted for 24 years because the jobs have been outside the city. Almost all the city jobs are downtown, and that is a particular type of job (white-collar government, big corp office, and prestige firms). The one job I interviewed for downtown wasn't actually going to be the routine work site.
When i originally moved to Indianapolis, real estate agents directed me to the suburbs. I fell for it and lived there for several years. After realizing i lost 1.5 to 2 hours each day, i bought a home midway between downtown and the start of the suburbs. I was suddenly a ten minute commute from driveway to not simply work but all of the other places i wanted to go. It came down directly to me travelling in the opposite direction for most of the traffic. In the 25 years since, patterns and my housing needs changed, but those communities remain great locations to commute in/out of when the direction/time opposes the bulk of traffic. The hours lost each week to car travel in this city remains crazy for people who follow the trends of suburbanization far outside the city limits.
I had a similar situation to Reverse Commuting In the mid 80's I worked a 40 hour work week in Suburban Atlanta between Friday and Mondays So I was totally off Tuesday Wednesdays and Thursday! Outside of commute their was very little traffic 🚦! I could do all my business virtually hassle free and Restaurants during Lunch were a breeze! Cheaper at Lunchtime too!
On a related topic, as a live event production tech in Greater London, I often get to leave home mid-afternoon. Not only are the trains from my side into town almost empty, they often run special accelerated schedules to get them back into position for the next full run outbound \m/
I had a 30 mile reverse commute for 2 years. It was awesome!