The Census Bureau does a lot more than just count the population! Among their many data-producing programs is a partnership with State Departments of Labor all around the country. The Bureau compiles Unemployment Insurance filing data, allowing we happy data users to examine where various types of workers work, where workers live, and also their commuting patterns.

ARC has updated our Commuting Patterns Dashboard with the recent release of the 2019 LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics. A key “first feature” of the dashboard, appearing on the home page of the tool as shown below on Exhibit I, is a ranking (to the left of the image) of top job concentrations by tract in the 21-County area and a ranking of top worker concentrations by tract (to the right of the image).

More interestingly, you can do custom analyses with the dashboard to see how far your neighbors and/or co-workers travel to work (and get insight into why we continually search for innovative solutions to Atlanta’s traffic).

For example, if you select the tract for Emory University (DeKalb Tract 224.02), you will see –in Exhibit II below–that the top residential tracts for Emory workers are all in DeKalb County, and the top 10 of these tracts– located in a ring around the university– account for about 12% of Emory employees.

But despite the residential clustering of Emory employees in nearby tracts, Exhibit III (below) does still show that a substantial number of university employees come from fairly far-flung areas across almost the entire Atlanta region.

And you can do these evaluations of job flow statewide. If you select Carroll County Tract 9103 (near the Alabama border), you can find out (see Exhibit IV) that a plurality of the tract’s relatively few resident workers work in their home tract;  the majority work elsewhere within Carroll County. But a small but significant number do work in the northern part of the Atlanta region–clustering in Floyd and Bartow Counties.