A Brief Look at Data on Seattle

Seattle. Photo Credit: Rattlhed at Wikipedia – Public Domain

Seattle is a rapidly booming and transforming city. I was browsing through some stats yesterday and noticed some areas where the city stood out, particularly in public transit and growth in foreign born population. So I thought I’d put some of these up quickly.

Keep in mind most of this data comes from the ACS, which has a margin of error. So changes in rankings based on small differences could be statistical noise. But this foots to what we see from other studies, such as the recent survey on downtown transit commute growth there.

Transportation

Seattle is now sixth in the country among major metros in its transit commute mode share at 9.5%. Seattle in fact now exceeds Philadelphia in transit mode share.

Seattle also ranks third in the nation, behind only NYC and SF, the increase in transit commute mode share since 2000. It’s up 2.6 percentage points.

The strength of transit commuting in Seattle is particularly noteworthy in light of it being a mostly bus oriented city that doesn’t have a major legacy rail network like Philadelphia’s.

Alon Levy says that at the CSA level, Seattle is roughly equal to Boston and Philly in transit commuting.

Immigration

Seattle now ranks 14th in the country in its foreign born population share at 18.2%. But it ranked third in the country for growth in foreign born population share since 2000, up 5.6 percentage points.

Education

In overall educational attainment, Seattle ranks eighth in the country in the share of adults with a college degree at 42.0%. It is ninth in the growth in the share of adults with degrees since 2000 at 9.2%.

Seattle ranks eighth in the country in the percentage of adults age 25-34 with college degrees at 46.6%. It ranked seventh in the country in the increase in college degree attainment for that age group since 2000 at 11%.

 

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2018/03/06/a-brief-look-at-data-on-seattle/