Question: What is the correlation between quality of jobs and commute time?
The full, unedited, original question is below:
It was surprising to see the percentage of respondents with a short commute to work. Do you have any information about the quality of the jobs for those respondents? For example, do those who live here have a short commute and a low paying job, while those with a longer commute have access to higher quality jobs in NYC.
This is a difficult question to answer, because even though we may have answers to some of these individual questions, it’s not always safe to draw a straight line between these answers to a specific conclusion (since correlation does not imply causation).
Commute difference between counties
Let’s start at Nassau and Suffolk County differences, because there are some.
Overall, Suffolk County residents have a shorter commute than Nassau County residents.
From there, we can look at income breakdown by counties.
Income difference between counties
When you look at income, Suffolk County has a larger percentage of people making $50K to $79K.
And now, we look at income and commute length…
Commute time distribution by income group
With these charts, we’re grouping everyone by their income group, and seeing the percentage of people in each group that travel “x” amount of time to work. We’re splitting them into Suffolk and Nassau Counties to get a clearer picture.
In Suffolk County, we find that 37 percent of people making $25K or less have a 1 to 14 minute commute.
But 37 percent of people making $80K – $119K have a similar commute time.
Or, if you flip the chart around and read it the other way, you could find this conclusion:
If you have a 1 to 14 minute commute and live in Suffolk County, the likelihood of you making less than $25K and you making $50K – $79K is almost the same (one percent difference). The difference between making less than $25K and $80K – $119K? Three percent difference.
In fact, in Suffolk County, you are more likely to be making less than $25K than you are making more than $120K if you have a commute time of over an hour.
Meanwhile, in Nassau County, the picture changes a little to something perhaps more expected.
As income levels grow, the distribution skews toward longer commute times.
What does this all mean?
We cannot assume that people who are making more money are necessarily driving to New York City for those better paying jobs, and hence have longer commutes. Because if we look at Suffolk County, commute time might not be a very effective indicator of income level.
And when we look at income distribution between the two counties, the difference between Nassau and Suffolk County for people making $50K and more is only three percent. It is small.