From a transportation perspective at least.
Heat map courtesy of the groovy Center for Neighborhood Technology’s Abogo website. Take it for a spin and let us know what you discover. It’s pretty detailed, giving heat map goodness all the way down to the neighborhood level.
For an example of this, see the screenshot close up of Decatur after the jump.
Elizabeth
Decatur Metro
Rick Julian
spreak
Marty
Old School
Brianc
Steve
smalltowngal
Decatur Metro
Decatur Metro
toml
toml
Elizabeth
Elizabeth
This is a neat model and I’m sure it’s pretty accurate. However, it’s derived from a lot of assumptions; it’s not based on reported or measured costs. It assumes typical behaviors. So if someone lives in a “red” area and carpools with 10 other people in a van, or bikes to work, or shares a car with his/her spouse roommate, that reduction in costs isn’t measured. The real person would save money but that savings wouldn’t be reflected on the map. Likewise, someone who lives next to the MARTA station in Decatur but has a job in Dahlonega and drives that distance would spend a lot more than what the map indicates.
Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing– it’s got us in a “yellow zone”, even though it takes me maybe 17-18 minutes to get to work in the morning, and I can tell you that we don’t spend anywhere close to $803 per month on gas (or otherwise) just to get to work…
Well, your transportation costs would not ONLY be gasoline. You’d have to also figure in the cost of your vehicle, insurance, repairs and maintenance, parking costs, if any, as well as gasoline. I’m assuming the added expense to folks in the red zones would be from added gasoline costs, plus putting more miles on a car would mean having to purchase new cars more frequently, as well as more repairs, etc.
Even so, my answer still stands. Even if I added in maintenance & other extraneous costs (on two not-brand-new cars, mind you), it’s still nowhere near that. Further, if we, the owners of said vehicles, would find it very difficult to separate the proportion of these costs attributable only to the to/from work transport from that accruing from all of our other trips & such, I don’t believe this site would be able to do that with any amount of accuracy, either. Just from what’s posted there, it’s not really clear how they can arrive at such specific figures, because their methodology is by no means narrow.
I’m not saying the site doesn’t give an interesting point from which to project, or to get people thinking, I’m just saying that its actual utility seems limited.
Parking costs are more significant than most people ackowledge.
Here’s a timely article on the matter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/business/economy/15view.html?_r=2&ref=todayspaper
I must “acknowledge” my spelling error
I just took a quick look at this and wondered–is it useful and representative of actual behavior to assume that people live in the suburbs and travel to work downtown?
That’s a very reasonable question but moot.
Postwar suburban residential developments are distributed, isolated, enclosed, connected only by speedways with a few access points, they feature curved internal roadways and cul-de-sacs and by design (and often law) do not permit commercial businesses within their perimeter. This pattern forces residents to access nearly all of their daily needs, education, employment and social contacts exclusively by the use of a personal automobile. A very wasteful and expensive mode that is fast becoming unsustainable.
Yep. You’ve perfectly summed up my sister’s life in the burbs. Don’t know how folks do it. Just one day of trying to pitch in with carpools is depressing. Always in the car? Never able to predict what’ll happen? Ugh!!!
I do the reverse; live in East Lake and schlep to Jonesboro 5 days a week. Ugh.