Los Angeles commuters were in a tizzy as the city shut down the freeway for much-needed bridge repairs.  In a city known for its car-centric culture, the driving interruption inspired a race from Burbank to Long Beach between a JetBlue passenger, a bicyclist and a public transit rider.  The bike won and the metro came in second.  The airplane came in third, though some say a roller blader squeaked across the finish line before it.

Using the 2009 American Community Survey, Social Explorer looked up some numbers to help keep gridlocked drivers occupied.

As background, Los Angeles commuters favor cars above all other transit, but not quite as much as the country as a whole.  In New York City, by contrast, commuters favor public transit over cars by almost two to one.  The tiny green bars in the below chart illustrate that few people bike to work anywhere, though more commuters bike to work in Los Angeles than in NYC (1 percent to 0.6 percent), likely in part because of the bike-friendly weather.

Means of Transportation to Work

As one might expect, New Yorkers are far less likely to have at least one vehicle available.  In New York, 55.6 percent of people reported having at least one vehicle while over 92.4 percent of Los Angeles residents have at least one set of wheels.

Though Los Angeles commutes are longer than the national norm, New Yorkers still tend to spend more time on the way to work than their west coast counterparts.

Travel Time to Work (in minutes)

Using Social Explorer, you can explore more travel data, such as morning departure times and details on the number of vehicles per household.  Just be careful not to query data while on the road until you come to a full and complete stop.

Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge recently appeared on CUNY TV to discuss the ongoing debate about the accuracy of the New York City census numbers.

View the segment “Census Count: Under or Not?” below:

Bucking city officials who question the lower-than-expected population growth rate, professor Andrew Beveridge says that the end result was right: “There may be a flaw in the census estimation approach and not the count.”

Read more on the census count controversy and Beveridge’s analysis in this Gotham Gazette article.

Virtual game company Zynga—the creator of popular social games such as CityVille and FarmVille—is planning to enter StockMarketVIlle shortly with an initial public offering of $1 billion, and the company could soon be valued at over $20 billion.  Zynga is perhaps best known for FarmVille—the game where players grow virtual crops and tend to virtual animals.

With the fake farm sector booming, Social Explorer examined data on the real farm industry in the US.  The Census Bureau combines certain occupations, so for this research, Social Explorer looked at the farming, fishing and forestry category, which is mostly made up of farmers and gives a good indication of how that group is performing.  While the overall employed population increased from 97,639,355 to 140,602,470 between 1980 and 2009, the farming/fishing/forestry sector shrunk from 2,811,258 to 988,070 (a decline of 64.9 percent) due to numerous factors, such as large-scale farming and automation.

Data from decennial census and 2009 American Community Survey for “farming, fishing and forestry” occupation category.

Meanwhile, FarmVille, which launched in June 2009, now has almost 38 million monthly active users—nearly six times the number of farms reported in the 1920 census (a high year for the sector) and over 17 times the number of farms in 2007 (according to the US Census of Agriculture).

Perhaps this signifies a shift to America’s agricultural heritage.  Census data from 1820 shows that 83.1 percent of working adults were employed in agriculture (with the rest in commerce and manufacturing).  Today’s Farmville participation rate on Facebook rivals the level of actual agricultural employees reported in the 1840 census (21.3 percent).

When you’re done watering your virtual crops and frolicking with your virtual sheep, check out Social Explorer’s maps and reports for more data adventures.

People, politics and data are clashing over plans to reopen a waste transfer station on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.  In the article “In Trash Fight, Upper East Side Cites Injustice,” New York Times writer Mireya Navarro details the key players and the demographics of waste transfer station sites around the city.  The article includes original research contributed by Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge, who also comments in the article.

The proximity of public housing figures prominently in a battle by Upper East Side residents to derail a city plan to reactivate a waste transfer station on the East River at 91st Street. In lawsuits, rallies and lobbying in the State Legislature, they argue that economically disadvantaged residents, already struggling, should not be saddled with additional problems.

…

But city officials and environmental justice advocates counter that a housing project does not make a community disadvantaged. The Upper East Side is one of the city’s wealthiest areas, they say, and the sanitation plan is intended to redress the disproportionate number of waste stations in poorer neighborhoods. None of the stations are in Manhattan.

A review by The New York Times of census tracts within roughly a half-mile of the transfer stations confirms that most of them are in moderate- to extremely low-income neighborhoods. More than half the stations are in two areas in particular: the Greenpoint and Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn, and the South Bronx. About 73,000 residents with a median household income of $40,200 for 2009 live near the waste transfer stations in those two Brooklyn neighborhoods, the census figures show; 92,000 people with a median income of $21,000 live near the sites in the South Bronx.

By comparison, the neighborhood near the proposed East River transfer station, Yorkville in the Upper East Side, has about 47,000 residents with a median household income of $91,000.

“It shows that they generally don’t build this sort of facility in high-income areas,” said Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College who analyzed the census figures for The Times. “Certain neighborhoods have certainly gotten more than their share.”

On average, people living near the waste stations had a median income in 2009 of about $40,000, compared with a city median of $50,000.

Click here to read the whole article.

To celebrate July 4th, Social Explorer is taking a break from fireworks and red, white and blue revelry to look back at an analysis we did of very early America.

A Look at the Capital on Independence Day

by Sydney Beveridge

As the United States celebrates the anniversary of its founding, using Social Explorer, I took a look at the nation’s first capital city of Philadelphia, then and now.  The first Census, conducted in 1790–the early years of the United States’s history–reveals some of the changes Philadelphia, along with the rest of the nation, has experienced.

Slideshow: Slavery in Philadelphia 1790-1840

The early censuses split race into two categories “white” and “nonwhite.”  Native Americans were not counted in the Census and blacks were counted for the apportionment of political representatives.  For allocating representation to states and counties based on population, a “nonwhite” counted as three fifths of a person.  (Blacks and women did not have the same voting rights as white men until the 20th century.  Women got the right to vote after the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920.  Voting for African Americans was granted by the 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, but blacks were kept off the voting rolls in the South until after the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.)

In 1790, Philadelphia was less than five percent nonwhite.  In 2007, over 43 percent of Philadelphians were black.  Of those nonwhite residents, 373 were slaves (15 percent).  Meanwhile, neighboring areas in New Jersey (Gloucester and Burlington) had more than twice as much of the nonwhite population enslaved. By the 1830 Census, there were 20 slaves left in Philadelphia, and by the 1840 Census, there were just two slaves left.

In the early decades of the United States, most Philadelphians came from Germany and Great Britain.  Today, those groups are small in number, with just 4.6 percent of Philadelphians identifying, another 0.1 percent identifying as Pennsylvania German, and less than one percent of Philadelphians identified as British, Welsh or Scottish.

If you want to find out more about your own area, back as far as 1790 or whenever it joined the union, and up through 2007, you can do so easily with Social Explorer.