1. Vancouver has 344,440 jobs. Let's call it 360,000 in 100 km^2 - gerrymandering a more compact zone with more jobs should be possible.
2. In the US, I have this data at the block level thanks to OnTheMap, so gerrymandering 100 km^2 (100 = Paris) city center blobs is easy.
3. In Atlanta, we can make a 100 km^2 zone covering downtown, the CDC, and Buckhead. It has 406,000 jobs.
4. Dallas's 100 km^2 central zone covers downtown, the Medical Center, the Bishop Arts District, and University Park. 406,000 jobs again.
5. In Houston it covers downtown, Uptown, Rice, TMC, UH. It has 565,000 jobs. Job density right outside it is nontrivial, unlike in Dallas.
6. In Miami, a 100 km^2 blob from downtown to Hialeah has 352,000 jobs. Miami Beach adds 35,000 in 5 km^2.
7. But all these metro regions are vast. DFW has 8 million people, and Houston, Miami, and Atlanta 7 each. Metro Vancouver has 2.5.
8. Despite being 3 times bigger than Metro Vancouver, these cities have barely more CBD and near-CBD employment, except Houston.
9. And even Houston only has about 1.5 times as many jobs in the 100 km^2 blob as Vancouver, barely half Vancouver's rate per capita.
10. What of smaller Southern cities? Well, they just have fewer central jobs. Nashville, with 2 million, has 250,000, inc. edge cities.
11. In Austin, if you gerrymander to the point of including Stonelake in city center you can cross 400,000, but if not, it's 300,000.
12. In Charlotte, with 2.7 million people, the 100 km^2 bounded by downtown, SouthPark, and the airport have 270,000 jobs.
13. You may notice that there are diseconomies of scale in the South. Charlotte's central-jobs-to-population ratio is higher than Dallas's.
14. But in areas with public transit (inc. bad stuff like BART, but not Dallas's excuse of a light rail system) it's different.
15. San Francisco is 100 km^2 and has 724,000 jobs. The inner 50 km^2 have 650,000 of those; a 50 km^2 Oakland-Berkeley blob adds 207,000.
16. The Bay Area manages to maintain a decent share of jobs in the central 100 km^2 even with unspeakable Silicon Valley job sprawl.
17. (If the denominator is MSA population and not CSA population, SF handily beats Vancouver on central 100 km^2 jobs share.)
18. In Boston the blob's limits are UMass, the airport, Chelsea, Malden Center, West Medford, North Cambridge, and Longwood. 790,000 jobs.
19. The Boston CSA has 8.3 million people, but that counts independent cities that were absorbed, like Providence and Worcester.
20. Nowhere else in the US is it more appropriate to use the MSA and not CSA as a sprawl measure, and there it's 790,000/4.9 million.
21. Is this relative centralization universal for older US cities? No! Philadelphia only has 490,000 (MSA: 6.1 million, CSA: 7.2 million).
22. Lang-Lefurgy's Edgeless Cities identified Philadelphia as extremely decentralized almost 20 years ago, and this holds up.
23. Now, Chicago. The US's 3rd largest city, until DC and SF overtake it at the CSA level in a few years. Soooo close to 10 million.
24. Job density in Chicago outside the Loop is so low the blob's size doesn't matter too much; only UChicago is significant. 968,000 jobs.
25. So Chicago is on a par with Boston and SF on the CSA level, but not on the MSA level, and it has no Providence or San Jose of its own.
26. Finally, DC. DC's inner edge cities are faaaaar. Never mind Tysons, you can't put Bethesda and Silver Spring both in a 100 km^2 blob.
27. A DC blob with Arlington and Crystal City but neither Bethesda nor Silver Spring hits 630,000. MSA = 6.2m, CSA = 9.8m (inc. Baltimore).
28. What I mean when I talk about job sprawl is, why would anyone who can even vaguely afford a car ride public transportation in Dallas?
29. Forget for a second that DART has frequency from hell. It's still a pretty long light rail system, as long as the Berlin U-Bahn.
30. The proportion of current Dallas jobs that are even semi-reasonably serviceable on any hypothetical train is minuscule.
31. Dallas has a Vancouver-size city center on 3 times the population; everyone has some destinations that will never be reachable by train.
32. Without even the ability to carve out a working portion of the region that's job-dense enough, the entire middle class drives.
33. Thus, Dallas's absolute public transport ridership is a fraction of Vancouver's. Ditto Houston's, Atlanta's, Miami's.
34. DART wants to build a city center subway to speed up commutes, but that's not really what Dallas needs.
35. A subway is useful, don't get me wrong. But what Dallas needs is around 500,000 extra jobs in city center.
36. Residential TOD would be nice too, but Calgary has almost the same transit mode share as San Francisco (MSA, not CSA) without that.
37. Build forests of towers in the centers of Dallas and the other Southern cities, then work on groves of apartment buildings around them.
38. The largest of these cities except Miami all come equipped with long urban rail networks that are just underused.
39. Do you want to know why Paris is Paris and Dallas isn't? Paris proper has 2 million jobs. insee.fr/fr/statistique…
40. And if you gerrymander a bit to exclude residential areas on the city's eastern margin and include La Défense, you can hit 2.2 million.
41. American cities keep building so much infrastructure but don't give people a reason to use it. Job sprawl is so much easier.
42. It's so much more important to encourage office and retail growth in city center, but the American Sunbelt doesn't do it even in TOD.
43. Vancouver is of course not Paris. But it's densifying, not just through residential TOD on SkyTrain but also through CBD formation.
44. Downtown Vancouver wasn't this tall 50 years ago. It's gotten this way over the decades, co-evolving with SkyTrain.
45. This is what American cities should be focusing on to densify, to reduce car usage, etc. Centralize these jobs. Now. /end
