The highest rates of car-free living occur about where you'd expect: North End, Beacon Hill, Chinatown, Fenway, Allston/Brighton and Mission Hill. There's also a pretty decent rate scattered across Roxbury and Dorchester. I was a bit surprised at how high the rates were in some outlying areas though. For example, around Malden Center there's a tract where 35% people claim to have no car available. Several Lowell tracts exceed 40%. One corridor that sticks out to me is Commonwealth Avenue through Brighton, which has consistently high rates of car-free residents, and can clearly be seen traced out in darker colors. This, despite the fact that the "B" branch has probably the worst quality T service of the rapid transit lines.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Car-free residents by census tract
I was looking at some census data out of curiosity today and decided to plot the percentage of car-free residents by census tract in and around the Boston metro area. The data come from the 2007-2011 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates.
The highest rates of car-free living occur about where you'd expect: North End, Beacon Hill, Chinatown, Fenway, Allston/Brighton and Mission Hill. There's also a pretty decent rate scattered across Roxbury and Dorchester. I was a bit surprised at how high the rates were in some outlying areas though. For example, around Malden Center there's a tract where 35% people claim to have no car available. Several Lowell tracts exceed 40%. One corridor that sticks out to me is Commonwealth Avenue through Brighton, which has consistently high rates of car-free residents, and can clearly be seen traced out in darker colors. This, despite the fact that the "B" branch has probably the worst quality T service of the rapid transit lines.
The highest rates of car-free living occur about where you'd expect: North End, Beacon Hill, Chinatown, Fenway, Allston/Brighton and Mission Hill. There's also a pretty decent rate scattered across Roxbury and Dorchester. I was a bit surprised at how high the rates were in some outlying areas though. For example, around Malden Center there's a tract where 35% people claim to have no car available. Several Lowell tracts exceed 40%. One corridor that sticks out to me is Commonwealth Avenue through Brighton, which has consistently high rates of car-free residents, and can clearly be seen traced out in darker colors. This, despite the fact that the "B" branch has probably the worst quality T service of the rapid transit lines.
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Green Line is light rail, not rapid transit. But the B Branch has lots of carfree people on it for almost the same reason it has poor service: college students.
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