Wealthy transit riders by county

Since the distribution of incomes seems to flatten out across a region - or at least, to reach a maximum of about 1 - it seems that the diversity happens at the county level. Accordingly, I tabulated a list of the counties with the highest ratios of transit incomes to driver incomes:

County	Drove alone median earnings	Public transportation median earnings	Public Transportation earnings margin of error	Transit/ Drove Earnings Ratio	Transit - drove / error
St. Lawrence County, New York	31,706	72,130	35,964	2.27	1.12
Cherokee County, Georgia	38,140	85,403	45,118	2.23	1.05
Kane County, Illinois	35,202	75,133	28,679	2.13	1.39
Litchfield County, Connecticut	41,540	82,431	28,064	1.99	1.46
Stafford County, Virginia	44,686	86,938	30,686	1.95	1.38
DuPage County, Illinois	40,473	75,500	11,404	1.86	3.07
McHenry County, Illinois	40,706	75,009	9667	1.84	3.55
Bristol County, Massachusetts	36,895	67,922	13,450	1.84	2.31
Spotsylvania County, Virginia	40,723	73,572	12,071	1.81	2.72
Ulster County, New York	35,289	60,748	10,658	1.72	2.39

There are some surprises here. What's going on in Saint Lawrence County, way up by the Canadian border? Is it something like we saw in Idaho Falls? I'm guessing that it's faculty commuting to SUNY Potsdam or Clarkson University. In any case, there are only 92 transit riders in the county, so maybe one of them can email me.

County	Workforce	Public Transportation	Public Transportation Mode Share	Mean Drive Time	Mean Transit Time	Transit / Drive time ratio
St. Lawrence County, New York	44,683	82	0.18%	20.2	35.7	1.771
Cherokee County, Georgia	101,795	457	0.45%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A
Kane County, Illinois	235,114	7160	3.05%	27.9	80	2.873
Litchfield County, Connecticut	95,152	1137	1.19%	27.3	61.5	2.257
Stafford County, Virginia	65,294	2420	3.71%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A
DuPage County, Illinois	454,598	30,222	6.65%	27.1	60.6	2.235
McHenry County, Illinois	149,929	4115	2.74%	32.8	82.3	2.513
Bristol County, Massachusetts	248,437	5282	2.13%	25.5	66.3	2.603
Spotsylvania County, Virginia	58,414	1803	3.09%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A
Ulster County, New York	81,878	1404	1.71%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A

Photo: Todd Hull / Cherokee Tribune

The case of Cherokee County, Georgia, is more straightforward. Just about all 457 of them pay $125 a month to ride an express bus into Atlanta several times a week. A massive HOV/BRT plan was shelved in 2009.

Litchfield County, Connecticut is the same as the Torrington Micropolitan Statistical Area discussed in my earlier post, and Ulster County, NY is the same as the Kingston μSA. The Illinois counties of Kane, DuPage and McHenry are all suburbs of Chicago reachable by Metra. Stafford and Spotsylvania counties in Virginia are southern suburbs of Washington, DC served by Virginia Railway Express, and Bristol County, Massachusetts is a suburb of Boston served by the MBTA commuter rail.

The 39 counties with an earnings ratio greater than 1 include suburbs of just about every metro area in the country: Fort Bend, TX (Houston, 1.71), Howard, MD (Baltimore, 1.69), Kitsap, WA (Seattle, 1.50), Chester, PA (Philadelphia, 1.39), Dakota, MN (Minneapolis-St. Paul, 1.28).

One other thing: of course you don't want your county to have too low an earnings ratio, because that means that all the poor people are being pushed onto transit. On the other hand, you don't want it too high either, because too many poor people driving means your local transit system sucks. A ratio of 1 is ideal; that's what you'd get if everyone took transit. Broadly speaking, it seems like there's an acceptable range from 0.698 (Multnomah County) to 1.25 (Bergen County), including those closest to 1, Norfolk County and Middlesex County, Massachusetts.