March Mapness: The Least Car-Dependent Neighborhoods in New York (And a Special One For NYC)

It’s been decided. It’s March Mapness. Here’s the car-free commute map for New York. This shows the percentage of residents in each census tract who get to work on foot, bike, or transit — anything that doesn’t involve a car.

I’ll be creating a map for each state and uploading census tract boundary files so that others who are interested can make their own maps showing whatever they’d like. If you’d like your state’s map up earlier rather than later, just let me know.

Here’s a link to the full-sized map.

For those interested in embedding the map on their own site, you’ll want to go here, click the tab that says “New York State” (or “New York City”), pull down the tab that says “Publish,” and copy from there. The embedded map will show whatever you’re looking at when you hit “Publish” — in my case I was viewing Rochester, for example — so keep that in mind if you want to highlight a specific area.

Since New York City is a special place where nearly every census tract has a non-car mode share above 50 percent, I made a second map with the colors coded to higher mode shares. In this version purple represents 85 to 100 percent non-car mode share, rather than 50+ percent. Even with these revised categories, half of Manhattan is still purple.

And again, here’s a link to the full-sized map.