Ever wonder where all the other people stop-and-going around you during your commute are on their way to? Or how many people are in town during the week versus on the weekends? No? Well, just go with me on this.

Suburb-to-suburb commuters outnumber city-to-suburb commuters in the U.S., but in a sprawling metro area like Atlanta’s, there’s a good chance your fellow commuters are on their way not just to another town, but to another county.

For their June “regional snapshot” (PDF) the ARC used 2010 census data to find out how the morning and afternoon flow of commuters affect the population of each of the 10 core metro counties by comparing daytime populations to resident populations.

“Daytime population,” by the Census Bureau’s definition, incluldes “the number of people who are present in an area during normal business hours, including workers. This is in contrast to the ‘resident’ population present during the evening and nighttime hours.”

The tricky element of that calculation is that the estimates are based on trips made only by workers, so they don’t include people coming into an area for anything other than work, like shopping, conventions, tourism or even those on business trips.

The largest daytime change occurs in Fulton Co, where the population increases by more than 32, percent to almost 1.2 million. Clayton County’s daytime population is boosted by 12.8 percent, thanks in part to the 58,000 people who work in and around the airport. Daytime population increases in Cobb and DeKalb counties are 2.3 and 0.2 percent, respectively.

At the other end of the spectrum, Paulding County’s population decreases by 25 percent during the day, and Cherokee County’s by more than 20 percent. Barrow County’s population falls by nearly 18 percent during the day, while Henry and Coweta County’s both fall by 15.7 percent.

Although it has the second largest percentage increase in daytime population for work, Clayton County also has the higest percentage of people leaving during the day for all trips combined, work and non-work. More than 51 percent of daytime trips that originate in Clayton County end somewhere else. Rockdale County was next, with about 47 precent of all daytime trips going outside the county, then DeKalb County at nearly 44 percent.

No huge surprises here, but it’s interesting to see some numbers put to the daily migrations.

MARTA

Tomorrow, March 24, MARTA is holding three public hearings   – two in Atlanta and one in Decatur – to gather input on bus route changes as well as tenative plans to revive the Braves Shuttle. The shuttle, which usually runs from Five Points Station to Turner Field on Atlanta Braves game days, was axed during last fall’s service cuts. Bus routes affected by the proposed changes are:

• Route 2 – Ponce de Leon Avenue/Moreland Avenue
• Route 87 – Roswell Road/Morgan Falls
• Route 99 – Boulevard/Monroe Drive
• Route 181 – Buffington Road/South Fulton Park & Ride

Here’s a map (PDF) detailing the proposed changes to routes 2 and 99. Here’s one for routes 87 and 181. The service changes, if they’re adopted will go into effect June 18.

GDOT

Next week, on March 30, the Georgia Department of Transportation is holding a hearing for public input regarding the Multi-Modal Passenger Terminal (PDF) project that’s planned for the downtown “gulch” area. GDOT announced last week that it had selected a development team led by Cousins Properties to build the potentially transformative transit project, but proposal summaries from all three of the short-listed development teams are still on the GDOT site.

If you can’t make it to the meeting, use the online comment form.

ARC

Still not enough civic engagement for you? The Atlanta Regional Commission is inviting metro Atlantans to an “online public meeting” to offer opinions on draft transportation recommendations  for “Plan2040,” the agency’s plan to “accommodate economic and population growth sustainability over the next 30 years.”  The online meeting is open until April 30.

“Everyone is from somewhere else.”

That phrase, along with “Everything is so spread out,” has a way of cropping up in descriptions of Atlanta, whether from new arrivals or decades-long residents.

While it’s true that “somewhere else” is often another state, another part of the country or another hemisphere, most of the time it’s somewhere else in Georgia, probably just a county or two away. That’s the pattern that emerged in the Atlanta Regional Commission’s latest “Regional Snapshot” report on local migration, published in March.

ARC analyzed IRS data that tracks moves in and out of the commission’s 20-county planning area from 2000 through 2007 for the report.

Michael Carnathan, the ARC researcher who produced the report, said it took about ten days of “pretty intense crunching” of the IRS data, plus about three weeks of writing to wring a user-friendly presentation of the numbers out of the 500,000-row spreadsheet he started with.

Of the approximately 3,128,896 people who moved into one of the 20 Atlanta metro counties between 2000 and 2007, nearly 60 percent came from within Georgia, and more than 52 percent moved from one metro county to another.
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