The hamsters are being ornery right now- forgive me if this thread ends up appearing fifty times or something. But on to the question…
The title pretty much sums it up, I guess. The population of Manhattan is around 1.5 million; I’m guessing the daytime “population” is significantly higher. Am I right? Wrong? Somebody gimme some numbers!
Another thing I’m curious about that is sort of related to this question is the seasonal populations of certain places, but perhaps I’ll save that for another thread.
I thought maybe it had to do with our esteemed ex-mod, but I wasn’t sure.
Thanks for the answer. 3.4 million does indeed seem like a lot relative to the regular residential population. Any idea how that compares to other cities and places?
There was an article in The Patriot Ledger a few years back claiming that Boston had approximately 1 million parking spaces, and 8 million people every day. But that seems out of scale compared with Manhattan’s stats?
Since the population of Boston proper is under 600,000, and the population of its metropolitan area is only just over 3.3 million, counting every man, woman, and child, that figure seems outlandish, to say the least! Census figures here: http://www.census.gov/population/estimates/metro-city/ma99-03a.txt
That figure doesn’t seem so unusual when you consider that the population of New York City – all 5 boroughs – was about 8 million at the 2000 census. Due to the very high cost of living, it is common to live in one of the outer boroughs and commute to Manhattan to work.
If anything, that figure seems low to me. Supposedly there are 19 million people living in the Consolidated Metropolitan New York City Area (that includes commuter regions located place like Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut as well as all five boroughs)
Somewhere I heard that the daytime population of New York City is 11 million, but I can’t find a confirmation of that.
First, the “outlandish” figure I was referring to was the 8 million commuters for Boston - that’s beyond the realm of possibility.
Turning back to NYC, if the 11 million figure is correct for daytime population, that would mean a net inflow of 3 million commuters. If my number for Manhattan is correct, almost 2 million of those commuters would be entering Manhattan every day. That would yield about 1 million commuters heading for the other burroughs. It’s hard to imagine that the Manhattan figure could be any higher than 2 million, especially when you realize that they all have to arrive through a limited number of bridges and a handful of tunnels.
It’s surprisingly difficult to find decent numbers for any of this. The census figures are fine for population, but getting anything definitive for numbers of commuters is tough!
(It would appear the Ilsa_Lund has morphed into Butthead. )
New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (subways, buses, and commuter trains) carries 7,771,972 passengers on the average weekday.
Subways & Buses: 7.06 million passengers per day
Long Island Railroad: 300k passengers per day (most into Manhattan)
Long Island Bus: 100k passengers per day (not all into the city)
Metro North Railroad: 252K passengers per day (most into Manhattan)
MTA Bridges and Tunnels: 842,150 vehicles per day (but not all lead into manhattan)
From various other sources.
Port Authority Bus Terminal: 188k passengers per day
Port Authority Trans Hudson (PATH) trains: 210k passengers per day
New Jersey Transit serves 342k commuters, but that is both internal to NJ as well as to NYC and Philly, so it is hard to tell how many cross the hudson.
These numbers don’t cover all of the access routes to Manhattan, but even allowing for a decent amount of overlap I can see an increase of 3 million people without any trouble at all. I would probably believe a number much bigger than that.
Looking at the census business data for New York County ( http://censtats.census.gov/cgi-bin/cbpnaic/cbpsect.pl ) I see in 2001 total employment in the city was 2.1 million, which is going to be low as businesses located out of state or outside the county (or with no known county) aren’t counted.
Interesting number. I wonder if someone who commutes to work gets counted again when he or she heads home. If so, and if you add in the folks driving over the bridges and through the tunnels (again dividing by two), you end up with something over 4 million people on the move on a given day.
That makes the “2 million heading for Manhattan” number sound pretty good, the other 2 million+ being people headed for jobs within their home burroughs, heading for jobs in other boroughs, heading from various burroughs to jobs outside NYC proper, delivery trucks that might make several trips over the bridges every day, and so on.
