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Where the jobs are in the Boston area
By adamg on Wed, 10/26/2016 - 3:02pm
MIT's Mobility Futures Collaborative, which is figuring out ways to promote bus rapid transit systems (think Silver Line, but more rapid), has used 2014 job data to map the locations and types of jobs in the Boston area.
Via Chris Devers.
Neighborhoods:
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Comments
It explains a lot
I always wondered who all those bearded guys sitting on the benches on the Common were. I see a smattering of purple ("education") dots, so they must be old college profs who burned out and landed there.
I work at a health care
I work at a health care company that's almost completely populated with green dots (finance). Am I missing something?
Tour guides?
The people who work in the Freedom Trail Information Center might be coded as education workers.
Those benches were good enough for Prof. Sean Maguire
So they are good enough for any other professor too.
fascinating
but a head-scratcher, too. For one, I'm not sure what they mean by "jobs." Legal address of business? Also I think the colors are off somehow, fwiw.
My home shows one job in health care, which if it were prof'l services could be my own small business. This means my upstairs neighbor's business is not included here (it is legal & registered here, but as his second job, may have had little to no meaningful income last year - I wouldn't know). Our next door neighbor, who is in her eighties & has never worked outside her home, has 2 job dots, also in health care. She has lived alone for over 15 years, & hers is a single family home. (She has no in-home care.) One whole side of our street shows health care dots at most of our neighbors' single family homes, although none of those people have businesses & they all work elsewhere. The other side of our street has no dots, although a couple of those people are self-employed & working from home as I am in prof'l svcs. Apparently the 8 jobs on my street are all health care? Our neighborhood is mostly single families, with a few multifamilies. Two streets over shows a smattering of education jobs in people's homes, & 3 blocks over shows a large number of utility & transportation jobs, also in people's homes.
Then the funeral home turned youth missionary cult has 7 health care jobs?
I love this idea - but is it me or does anyone else see problems with this?
A large parking garage in the
A large parking garage in the Charlestown Navy Yard is apparently the source of a large number of professional services jobs (there are only cars in that garage, not offices), and the medical research building next to it is home to a number of financial services jobs, so... I don't trust this data at all.
Micro data suspect
I'm sure the big blobs are useful, but micro analysis is suspect.
Apparently my house has 1 wholesale or retail job.
Apparently all BU professors work at 881 Comm Ave (my bet is that's their paycheck address).
Notice how nobody works at the Target or Home Depot at the South Bay shopping center, but folks work on the other side of the parking lot.
Etc.
Yeah I agree
My office and the adjacent college building list only a handful of hospitality workers and nothing else. Lots of "education" folks in both places.
That's a sweet map, but it's
That's a sweet map, but it's not perfect:
- Tufts Health Plan building west of Mt. Auburn Cemetery is marked green (Finance)
- Building I work at is hugely under-represented (it's barely on the map, actually)
Very interesting observations as well:
- Mass Ave through Cambridge and Arlington is an important thoroughfare, just like Watertown Square and Waltham
- Some interesting clusters north and to the southwest
It would be really cool for someone to create a commute map (how do you even represent that?) to show the paths people take (or at least as the crow flies) to work.
" Silver Line, But More Rapid "
( That's like saying: "a snail's pace, but more rapid". )
No Duh
What a giant "duh" this map is. Jobs in the financial district you say? Aw, go on!
If you zoom all the way in on
If you zoom all the way in on that sole yellow dot in MetroWest, it expands into a big chunk of Public Admin and Transportation jobs that seem to be located in the Mormon church in Weston.
I'm guessing it's really from the nearby State Police site.
I call BS
I only spent about three minutes looking at some addresses I know, but the characterization of every single one was incorrect.
Even MIT
Even some of the MIT data isn't right. In all of the Media Lab as well as the Medical building, there are only a handful of "hospitality" jobs and that's it?
No offense intended but...
after reviewing the map I suspect the MIT data aggregators may have dabbled with pre Question 4 approved substance.
Probably
Style-over-substance and overly-industry-friendly research groups on this.
Corrections form
Submit your corrections for the map.
"crowdsourcing"
Aw, we just want to complain, we don't actually want to do this group's work for them :)