Sunday, August 03, 2008

That's why they call them cliches

Jobs-housing "balance" is often invoked by urban planners and others as if it had meaning. It is presumed that commuting can be minimized if the balance is somehow achieved. But the idea has problems. First, at what geographic scale? Second, there is more to life that commuting, which is traded off against many other priorities. Third, a certain amount of balancing will occur naturally because employees and employers tend to srike balances (better use of the term) that work for them. So JHB is another one of those top-down fools' errands.

Wendell Cox manages to get to the data before some of us slow pokes and he manages to present and share them in very useful ways. Here is his latest on commuting in the New York area. Again, most of the cliches about New York and commuting in New York are shown to be wrong.