taal
Senior Member
The New York metropolitan area has a LOT of suburban areas outside city limits such as Westchester County north of New York, Nassau/Suffolk Counties on Long Island, parts of Connecticut (especially Stanford), and large sections of northern NJ and there are many jobs in these areas. Plus there are many jobs within the outer boroughs of NYC (Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, Staten Island). An example of a "business park" in the suburbs of New York is IBM world headquarters in Armonk, NY (a distant suburb north of NYC in Westchester County).
I would have to look carefully at the US census data that I linked to in order to figure out how many jobs are where (they are listed by county), but I think that the proportion of jobs in Manhattan/outer boroughs/elsewhere in metropolitan area is pretty similar to the proportion of jobs in downtown Toronto/416 suburbs/905. Also it is pretty clear from the census data that most of the residents of these outer suburbs work locally, and only a small minority commute to NYC, which is similar to the pattern in the GTA. Not surprisingly, transit mode share in greater New York is pretty low, even though it is very heavily used within NYC proper, because the transit systems in many of the suburbs of NYC are much, much worse than those in the 905.
I'd be really curious to see the numbers - I remember when I looked at the amount of office space in Chicago's core compared to the rest of greater area there was a larger % located in the core then Toronto, but not by as much as I thought. I'll try to find the numbers again.