Welcome to the Princeton Carpool Repository
One of the goals in Princeton’s Master Plan is to “ to entice people out of their cars... and reduce the number of single-occupancy vehicles...by providing viable alternatives for people to get to work, shop, or recreate.”
However, many Princeton residents and in-commuters to Princeton from other communities live in neighborhoods and towns too dispersed and distant from their workplace to be served by traditional transit. In their case, the best way to “reduce the number of single-occupancy vehicles” is to encourage more carpooling and ridesharing. At present about 2.2% of Princeton’s working residents carpool or rideshare to work. About 5.5% of those who come to work in Princeton from elsewhere each day do so.
We need an “app” that makes it easy for people who want to carpool or rideshare with neighbors or fellow workers to find each other and “hook up” and help us reduce the volume of vehicular traffic in town
This project is a partnership with our friends Princeton Future.
- Tables with information on Princeton in and out commuters are available in a_princeton_carpooling_app.doc
- Picture of areas defined on a map in Residential\ Areas\ &\ Employment\ Destinations\ in\ Princeton.jpeg
- Some of the data used to calculate the number of in and out commuters is here NJ\ Transit\ work\ flows\ re-work.xls
Commuter origins & destinations
(1) You will find an Excel spreadsheet attached in matrix form that identifies commuter origins and destinations both in total and by mode of how they get to work. Read down a column and you get the community's out-commutes. Read across the column and you get the in-commutes. This particular spreadsheet has been touched by human hands at several points. First human hand: The original data was gathered by the 2000 Census Journey-to-Work survey. Since that year, Congress forebad the Census Bureau from doing surveys in the decennial censuses which the Constitution requires to tally only “direct” counts of the population. So in order to update the origin and destination data, the bureau prepared the "Census Transportation Planning Product,” which updates the 2000 information to 2006-2010. Second human hand: The Research Division of New Jersey Transit then extracted from this CTPP data the origin/destination info for central New Jersey (which is what you see here). Third human hand: As you will see this information was developed before Princeton consolidated as a municipality, so I combined the borough and township information into a “Consolidated” column. Fourth human hand: But the matrix is too complicated for a lay person to understand and use, so I produced the simplified columns sent to you in my memo about Princeton’s in-commutes and out-commutes.
How Do They Get To Work?
(2) Anyone can get straightforward data about how many residents work and how they get to work directly from the census website. The trouble is that in order to determine how many work in town and how many commute out, you must go through several steps. Furthermore, if you want to go below the town-wide level to “census block groups” you must specify a different geography. So rather than relying upon the final results I sent you, I refer your folks directly to the “American Factfinder” website operated by the U.S. Census, click “advanced search” specify your geography as either “Princeton, Mercer County, New Jersey” or “census block group” in Mercer County, then:
For town:
Seek table S0801 for commuting characteristics Table S0802 for means of transportation to work Table S0804 for means of transportation to work by workplace geography (this includes in-commuters and residents who work in town). The user must then re-package this data so that it shows the in-commuters and out-commuters and residents who work in town. (see my memo.)
For census block groups:
Once you get all the census block groups showing for Mercer County, you will want to sort out blocks numbered 40, 42, and 45 (there are 18) and then, separately, pull down tables B08009 (for place of work), B08134(means of travel by time), B08301, means of transportation to work.
-make a mobile or web app so that a user can easily identify or click on his or her area of employment in Princeton. Then click on the area where he or she resides. If he or she finds a “match,” it should enable an easy “hook up.”
Additional resources:
- Download or fork here to start contributing
- If there are any comments, issues, or suggestions please open an Issue through the tab on the right
The original dataset is located under originalDataset