Non-Residential County Commuters

            The social data we chose to map is the percentage of residents who commute outside their residential county for work. The counties are arranged with the lighter colors having the lowest out-of-county commuters and the darkest color, purple, having the highest. The first thing that is noticed is that the purple counties are mostly the smallest counties. This is because the counties probably have less job opportunities because of the small area. A lot of the yellow and tan counties are larger counties  so there are less people commuting outside of them because there are probably more opportunities and also because it may be a longer distance to commute. The average county has about 32% of workers commuting outside of their residential county to work. This stat is included in the orange counties, which are mostly counties that fall in-between the higher populated areas such as the lower Hudson Valley and the Finger Lakes area. These are probably working class people who can afford to commute into the metropolitan areas, such as Albany or NYC. These two cities have higher number of non-residential workers because the cities lie close to county boundaries. All cities that lie towards the middle of their counties have lower percentages of non-residential workers because there are suburbs in the counties, or at least space for many people to live in the county where they work.

            I think it’s very interesting to compare NYC to a city like Syracuse because of this last reasoning. The counties in NYC have high percentages of non-residential workers because of their small size, but also because accessibility to the city is possible by many surrounding counties. Queen County, the largest county in the city, has a high number of people who probably work right in Brooklyn or western Nassau County. These people living in Nassau and Brooklyn County might work in Queens because of the close proximity; these counties could be basically swapping residents and workers. A city like Syracuse is able to have the stereotypical urban-suburban layout because of the size of the county and the lack of urban areas in surrounding counties. Onondaga County (containing Syracuse) has only five percent of people that commute to another county, but every surrounding county has at least thirty percent. The orange and brown counties actually surround all the tan (lowest percentage) counties. In western NY it is easy to see the typical suburban commuter layout. Cities like Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Ithaca, Binghamton, Watertown, and Plattsburgh all lay in the lowest commuting counties because there are job opportunities in these cities. People in surrounding counties are forced to commute to find work or are higher class workers who can afford to commute outside of their residential county. Excluding NYC because of its complicated layout, this map could be used to argue that in these bad economic times people are forced to commute into counties with cities and job opportunities. People in these counties are rarely working in another county, but the surrounding counties have much higher percentages of commuters.

            This data was found on the American Fact Finder website which is run by the U.S. Census Bureau. The data is a 5 year estimate gathered by the American Community Survey using the 2006-2010 Census’, it applies to legal workers aged 16 years and older that reside in a New York State County.