An assessment of Census 2000 commuter patterns for the promotion of commuter rail in California's Central Valley

In the 2000???s, two commuter trains were built in the Western United States, the Front Runner in Utah and the Rail Runner in New Mexico. These two train systems connected adjacent metropolitan areas to each other and created a rail connection for all the cities and towns in their linear path. In California???s Central Valley (the Valley), like the two regions in Utah and New Mexico, a corridor of cities and towns has developed along a major highway (Highway 99), and this corridor forms a chain of contiguous metropolitan areas such as Sacramento, Stockton, and Modesto. This thesis explores whether the section of the Valley from Chico to Merced had a pattern of commuter origins and destinations collected for the 2000 census that would suggest it was equally suitable for a linear commuter rail system as the Utah and New Mexico study areas showed in the 2000 census, which allowed their rail systems to be implemented in the following decade.\ud The Census 2000 contained comprehensive data on commuting statistics, based on origin and destination. This data was available at multiple levels of geography, such as county, tract, and block group. This presented an opportunity to conduct a spatial analysis to illustrate and statistically compare the commuting patterns in the three study areas, especially in the advent of California???s High Speed Rail initiative. Such analyses can help determine whether there is any similarity in commuting patterns in the three regions, and how they compare in terms of linearity (bearing).\ud In order to effectively promote rail, discussion should be made of rail???s advantages, what would encourage potential riders to switch modes from automobile to rail, what kind of developed landscape is conducive to rail startup, and what type of urban structure can develop at key destination stations once rail has been implemented. Considerations should be made about the type of data being used for this study, and its advantages over conventional sample data for this particular type of analysis.CSU, Chic