Transportation & warehousing
The share of jobs within commuting reach of a tract that are in transportation and warehousing, and how that share has moved over five years.
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Of all the jobs within commuting reach of a tract, the share that are in transportation and warehousing. This describes the mix of nearby work rather than its volume.
The Census Bureau defines the sector as including "industries providing transportation of passengers and cargo, warehousing and storage for goods, scenic and sightseeing transportation, and support activities related to modes of transportation." Establishments "use transportation equipment or transportation-related facilities as a productive asset," and the modes covered "are air, rail, water, road, and pipeline." The sector also contains subsectors for postal services and couriers (2022 NAICS Manual).
Because the definition ties the sector to equipment and facilities, its workplaces are infrastructure: ports, rail yards, airports, terminals, storage and distribution buildings. Their location is governed by highway, rail, and water access rather than by where people live, which is why this share often peaks in tracts with little residential population. The same definition means that goods sitting in storage between producer and buyer are counted here rather than with manufacturing or retail, so this share responds to how a region's goods distribution is organized.
Metrics in this family#
Considerations#
Jobs are counted where the work is based, not where the worker lives. This sector strains that convention more than most: drivers, couriers, and crews are assigned to a terminal or depot while performing the work over a wide area, so a tract's count reflects where the operation is administered rather than where the activity occurs.
The Census Bureau protects employer confidentiality before publication. The disclosure limitation applied to "the workplace component of LODES uses employer-level input noise infusion" (McKinney et al., CES-WP-20-30), so published small-area values are perturbed relative to the underlying counts.
Coverage is jobs subject to state unemployment insurance, plus federal workers from 2010 onward (OnTheMap Data Overview). Independent owner-operators who are not on a payroll fall outside that frame. The reference period is the second quarter of each year.
Two gaps carry through from the published files: Alaska has no workplace data after 2016 and Michigan none after 2021. Tracts there carry no value rather than a zero.
The twenty sector shares sum to one, so a rise here is arithmetically a fall across the rest of the mix.
Birdseye derives these shares from the sector job counts the Census Bureau publishes; the shares themselves are not a published series.
References#
- 12022 NAICS Manualhttps://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
- 2McKinney et al., CES-WP-20-30https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2020/CES-WP-20-30.pdf
- 3OnTheMap Data Overviewhttps://lehd.ces.census.gov/doc/help/onthemap/OnTheMapDataOverview.pdf