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Thursday, March 06, 2003

By Gary Rotstein, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Allegheny County remains the region's dominant job center, but the workers holding those jobs increasingly are commuters who live outside the county.

	Online graphic Cross-county commuters

New Census 2000 statistics reveal that every surrounding county is sending far more residents to work in Allegheny County than was the case in the 1990 census.

Among the most striking examples are outlying areas such as Lawrence County providing twice as many people to work in Allegheny County as a decade earlier, and Jefferson County, Ohio, where Steubenville is located, sending three times as many.

At the same time, more Allegheny County residents are crossing county lines to work elsewhere than in 1990, though that flow has generally not increased as much.

The new information, whether applied to commuters in either direction, jibes with earlier findings from the census long form showing that commuting times to work increased during the 1990s both locally and nationally.

"You see that more and more, that where you live and where you work are two different places. It's certainly not unique here," said Richard Moody, regional economist for PNC Financial Services Group. He and other analysts have not yet been able to examine the data, which is being released today.

Economic development advocates cited regional transportation improvements, the comparatively weak economies in certain outlying counties, and the desire of some people to live outside the urban core and enjoy lower tax rates as factors that might explain the commuter trend.

Job growth throughout the region in the 1990s also contributed to the higher numbers of commuters. The six-county metropolitan area produced about 85,000 additional jobs in the second half of the decade.

"I guess people vote with their feet, and they're voting to stay here to live and commute in 45 to 50 minutes," said John Brown, executive director of the Brooke-Hancock-Jefferson Metropolitan Planning Commission, covering communities in the Steubenville-Weirton, W.Va., area.

He said improvements during the 1990s to U.S. Route 22, including construction of a new bridge crossing the Ohio River, have shortened traveling times to both Downtown Pittsburgh and the area around Pittsburgh International Airport and in Robinson, which has grown as a jobs center.

The Beaver Valley Expressway has apparently had a similar impact, helping explain the influx of Lawrence County residents working in Allegheny County.

The flow of commuters from Butler, Washington and Westmoreland counties to Pittsburgh is higher in each case than the number of Allegheny County residents working in those counties, but the differential is less than in counties with weaker economies.

The census shows seven times as many residents of Armstrong and Fayette counties working in Allegheny as the other way around, but only three times as many residents doing so from Washington County and slightly fewer than that from Butler County.

"People are leaving Allegheny County to live and retaining their jobs in Allegheny. I think that trend has been true for an awful long time in this region," said Christopher Briem, regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Social and Urban Research.

There were actually fewer Allegheny County residents who reported working within the county in 2002 than was the case in 1990, 536,655 instead of 555,766.

While more Allegheny County residents than before are commuting outside the county, to growth sectors such as Cranberry in Butler County, Southpointe in Washington County and along U.S. Route 30 in Westmoreland County, Briem said the growth of suburban job centers has not been as great in the Pittsburgh region as in many metropolitan areas.

Gary Rotstein can be reached at grotstein@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1255.