Let there be a bridge

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No matter what you think of the MFX this is cool in itself.  h/t to The Atlantic Cities for catching this time-lapse video posted online by Brenda Smeltzer capturing the erection of the  Monongahela River Bridge, a section of the nearly vestigial Mon Fayette Expressway.   See below.

I will say that the current picture of the bridge in waiting has an almost impressionistic quality to it.

Even as someone who tries to follow such things I find that the true status of the greater Mon Fayette Expressway is hard to discern.  I believe it has been years since the local project office closed. Still the explanation of the office's closing..i.e. that it was merely: "pause in project advancement due to funding limitations" remains a paragon of bureaucratic euphemism.  The project's web site clearly identifies itself not as for the full "Mon Fayette Expressway" but merely for the Brownsville to Uniontown segment. 

One thing is for sure.. the MFX has a nearly perpetual history to it all.  Some good comments on that history in this old post here .  I am reminded of how long that history is every time I go over the Birmingham Bridge.  If you ever wonder why that bridge is so seemingly over-engineered (photo in that link via Evergrey on the Skyscraper forum), it clearly was once intended to be a cog in the greater highway vision. So it was not intended to be merely a connection between the Southside and Oakland/Uptown, but the major ingress to the city for a highway that never came to be.  Even if it is being underused in that sense, they ought to oil the joints as they are supposed to, but seem to overlook.  To be fair, that problem was a bit more complicated than that, but still lack of maintenance was a contributing factor.

I digress...  What I would love to see is a compilation of other Pittsburgh-themed time-lapse videos that are out there.  We at least need a top 10 don't you think?  Nominations?

Anyway...  the new bridge:

How many natural gas vehicles are there in Pennsylvania?

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Seems like a simple question doesn't it.  All the talk, buzz and policy swirling around the future of natural gas you would think someone would have information on the total number of natural gas vehicles currently in use in Pennsylvania.  I could not easily find anyone with a guestimate even which I thought is strange.  Can anyone find what I missed?  Even an estimate would be something.

That was inspired by this article in the Economist recently on some international benchmarking of natural gas vehicle usage by country.  I simplify the infographic into something that is surprising. My question is how big would Pennsylvania's dot be if we had the data?  Big enough for screen resolution to show?



This post is really a test to see if Wiz's 3rd shift is awake yet.

No story here... move on....

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Maybe it would be interesting if compared to this national trend:

So let's see...   Labor force = (working age) population  x labor force participation
using deeply atrophied algebra (algebra you may not have noticed is under some deeply deeply defeatist attacks of late):
population = labor force / labor force participation
hmmmm........   but so as to be a bit more thorough, it is important to note that Pennsylvania's labor force participation is up 0.5% over the year (June to June).. which if true for the Pittsburgh region would be responsible for a year over year increase in the size of the labor force of around 9,000 people (remember it's a ratio of the working age population)... or roughly 3/8th of the total increase in the region's labor force (+24 thousand) over that time.   What you often see in public punditry is an overeliance on the explanation that people are 'jumping into' or out of the labor market as conditions change.  Labor force participation changes a lot more slowly than most presume and is not the answer for most variance in the labor force regionally.  It is a different issue than for the nation since migration impacts regional labor markets in a distinct way compared to the national labor market. 
and just btw...  population flows are typically greater than labor market migration flows since workers often bring with them their families.. not all of whom are made up of folks in the labor force.
And just in case we are lacking a resident labor historian I will point out one last little observation.  Compare the rates at which Pittsburgh's labor force was growing in the 1970's and what has been the trend the last few years here.    Comparable periods?   There was this minor social phenomenon called the 'baby boom' that resulted in more than a few people entering the workforce mostly in the 1970s.   I think we can all rest assured on the assumption that there was not some secret ramp up in births in Pittsburgh 20 years ago that is responsible for what is going on now. 

Cleveburgh too far

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Just too much to allegory in the news that a co-owner of the Steelers is buying the Cleveland Browns.

It turns out that the real origin of 'Cleveburgh' is not only from Cleveland, but comes has its origins in the Browns/Steelers rivalry at the time (that would be in pre-slide years for those too young to remember).

Or some team called the Browns that is.   My Ohio friends get a bit mad at me when I point out that the Browns actually left town some years ago.  The real Browns had some serious serious fans.  The Dawg Pound today can't quite fill the seats they have.  Except for a few games each year. 

Is Downtown dying?

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Got your attention?

Relax.

So there are times when you really need to understand your data before jumping to conclusions. Generally speaking a lot of us are loathe to ever use data reported by zip code. Zip code areas are a bit arbitrary and don't really align to anything else. Data collected by zip code has some issues you really have to think about before overinterpreting. Still, you wind up being forced to look at some data by zip code because there sometimes is just no other data available on small geographic areas.

Which is all a disclaimer before looking at the latest data out from the Census Bureau's Zip Code Business patterns program. One perpetual question here is what is happening Downtown? The Zip Code data is for jobs by place of work, but that is what you want to look at Downtown.   Most often when you see employment data reported in the news it is a count by place of residence. For places like Downtown, the difference between a count of jobs by place of residence and jobs by place of work are completely different numbers. Soooo....When I add together the job counts for zip codes 15222 and 15219 (the main Zip Codes covering Downtown and some environs into the Hill District and the Strip District) over the last decade the trend looks like this.


Here is the thing. I don't believe there is any real trend obvious in that data. If you have ever looked at what the raw data looks like you will notice some important things. If you go back a decade or so you will have seen there were a lot of establishments being reported as located Downtown that likely were not really located there. My take is a lot of smaller businesses were winding up being reported in the location of their main branches or even for their accountants on occassion. I believe the data gnomes at the state have worked hard over the last decade to clean up that particular data issue and you see the results early in the last decade. So what appears as a decline in jobs roughly a decade ago is really data cleaining IMHO. Then there has been a general cleaning resulting from establishment reclassifications. If you are not careful a HQ location can have more employment attributed to it than is really ground truth. That has been cleaned up as well. So I think that a number between 90K and 95K has been the consistent number of jobs located in Downtown between the rivers for quite some time even if it appeared higher 10-15 years ago.

If there has been any decline in jobs it likely is mostly attributable to retail sector jobs. One decline in Downtown employment has likely been in retail since there are now significantly fewer large department stores than in the past. The large department stores were significant concentrations of jobs. These job counts mostly will not differentiate between part-time and full-time, or high pay or low paying jobs. Department stores being big concentrations of part time work means they really can add a significant number of jobs.

So yes there are big things going on Downtown as there are in all dynamic places. Some jobs have moved out of the "Golden Triangle" proper yet remained close. Alcoa's jobs moved over the river. Ongoing dispersal from the old Regional Economic Tower will have an impact. Not that long ago the legacy of Kaufmann's kept a decent sized back office staff Downtown. All while the banks have all had big expansions Downtown. I think there are more lawyers Downtown than ever and all sorts of other things churning. In jobs or migration, churn isn't bad. Anyway.

If anyone really thinks jobs located Downtown have shrunk much over the decade... what are parking rates these days? More importantly, has anyone pegged the over/under for what percentage Downtown parking rates will go up as bus routes keep getting cut. I have been thinking about this some. A lot of commuters Downtown will find alternative ways to get to work... but there will not be any real escape for those who pay for parking.

So what do the jobs downtown pay. The same ZBP data also has good data on payrolls. So here is the total payroll at the two Downtown zips going back a few years. So even with a big decline in job counts, the total payroll has generally been pushing up at a rate above that of inflation.



So now put the two together and you get an average payroll $ per job.



This gets more interesting. So the average payroll Downtown peaked at over $66K per job Downtown in 2008.  Finance and law both took disproportionate hits in the recession and are likely the cause of the decline in subsequent years. Again that is just the average which includes the retail that still exists there. So the non-retail average is higher for sure. What was that about parking costs?

  Now.. the real question is how competitive Downtown is compared to other areas of the city/county/region. Clearly Downtown has higher paying jobs than most anywhere else, but is it likely to remain so in the future. So I computed the same average payroll per job for the county over the same years. The MSA average is unsurprisingly significantly lower than for Downtown... but here is where the rubber meets the road. How has the ratio of pay been trending. Here is what I get for the average payroll per job Downtown compared to the Pittsburgh MSA as a whole.. Generally a trend up and inthe future we will see if the downdraft between 2008 and 2010 has turned around.


So if anything... the concentration of higher paying jobs in the county, which itself has a disproportionate concentration of the higher paying jobs in the region, is trending up pretty clearly. So the next time you hear anyone even suggest that jobs are fleeing the city or Downtown.. or have ever fled the city in the past... ask to see their data they are basing that conclusion on...

Finally... for the history buffs or those who think all numbers in the past were higher.  On this question of how stable Downtown has employment has been... here is something from p7 of the Mass Transportation Study of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, Part 2 that the ACCD commissioned in 1951.  Read and compare the reference there for the jobs count in the 'Golden Triangle'. You might need to click on the image to read the precise number.