Earlier this month, I wrote a blog post about which cities are next for a congestion fee. So far, the only city in the United States that has implemented a congestion fee is New York City, and we estimate in our cost-benefit analysis of Manhattan’s congestion fee that in 2025 alone, the zone produced $2 billion in net benefits.
One of the patterns we noticed in other cities that have implemented congestion fee zones across the globe is that they are almost always centered on the city’s central business district. This makes sense: the central business district is typically the most consistently busy part of a city. People commute there to work, retail and dining naturally cluster around those workers, and freight trucks have to enter daily to deliver food and supplies to local businesses
To try to predict which cities might implement congestion fee zones next, we looked at employment by central business district estimates from Demographia. The results were about what you would expect: New York City, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Chicago were the top four cities with the highest proportion of their workforces in the central business district.
However, Demographia’s last published breakdown used 2012-2016 data, and a lot has changed since then (the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of remote work, for instance). Today, I decided to replicate Demographia’s methodology to update these numbers using more recent data.
What data is available?
We use American Community Survey data a lot at Scioto Analysis. The American Community Survey is an annual survey by the federal government on social, economic, demographic, and housing information, and it helps inform a lot of our analysis. While standard American Community Survey data is helpful for telling us where people live, it’s not designed to tell us where people work.
However, every five years, the Census Transportation Planning Products program releases five-year estimates of where people work, where they live, and how they commute between the two using pooled microdata from the American Community Survey. The most recent dataset is 2017-2021. The most recent dataset covers 2017-2021, capturing early post-pandemic shifts in commuting and remote work.
The Census Transportation Planning Products data includes total jobs by census tract, city, and metropolitan area, but it doesn’t explicitly label which census tracts belong to central business districts. The United States Census Bureau used to regularly publish reports defining central business districts, but they stopped doing this decades ago. As a result, to identify central business districts, we have to start with the Census Bureau’s 1982 central business district boundaries.
Central business districts have obviously evolved since 1982. To match Demographia’s methodology, I made a couple of adjustments to the central business districts (like expanding districts in New York City and Chicago), but because there’s no current official designation, it’s possible that some districts are inaccurate. Finally, because tract boundaries shift over time, we run the historical tracts through census tract crosswalks to accurately link 1982 district boundaries to 2021 workplace data.
What cities do people work downtown the most?
Using the data sources above, I calculated estimates for the cities where people work in the central business district the most among the top 50 metropolitan areas in the country. The table below shows the top ten metropolitan areas with the most workers in the central business district.
| Top Cities for Central Business District Employment | |||
| Metropolitan Area | Central Business District Employment | Metro Employment | Central Business District Share of Metro Employment |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York, NY | 1.6 million | 6.9 million | 24% |
| Chicago, IL | 240,000 | 3.6 million | 6.6% |
| San Francisco, CA | 230,000 | 1.6 million | 14% |
| Philadelphia, PA | 210,000 | 2.3 million | 9.4% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth, TX | 200,000 | 1.8 million | 11% |
| Boston, MA | 180,000 | 1.9 million | 9.6% |
| Washington, D.C. | 170,000 | 2.2 million | 7.6% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN | 160,000 | 1.3 million | 12% |
| Los Angeles, CA | 130,000 | 4.1 million | 3.3% |
| Atlanta, GA | 100,000 | 910,000 | 11% |
The top ten cities for central business district employment aren’t very surprising. Most of the biggest cities in the country also have the largest central business district workforces. All ten of these metropolitan areas, other than Dallas-Fort Worth and Minneapolis-St. Paul, saw their central business district employment decrease in the 2021 data compared to 2016.
One obvious explanation for this trend is the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of workers moved to hybrid or remote work environments during stay-at-home orders. Because of this, some companies may have closed their downtown offices. Even as businesses reopened, a lot of workers remained online, and some companies may have moved outside of the central business district amidst rising prices for property.
Los Angeles ranks ninth in central business district employment, which is surprisingly low given that its metropolitan area employment is only second to New York City. The proportion of workers in the Los Angeles metropolitan area that work downtown is a measly 3.3% compared to New York City’s 24%. However, the public transit system in New York City is superior to Los Angeles’s, and the population density in Los Angeles is about one-third of New York City.
To better understand which cities have the highest concentration of workers in their central business districts, the table below shows the top ten metropolitan areas with the highest proportion of downtown workers.
| Top Cities for Central Business District Employment as a Share of Metro Employment | |||
| Metropolitan Area | Central Business District Employment | Metro Employment | Central Business District Share of Metro Employment |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York, NY | 1.6 million | 6.9 million | 24% |
| Louisville, KY | 76,000 | 410,000 | 18% |
| Indianapolis, IN | 97,000 | 530,000 | 18% |
| New Orleans, LA | 60,000 | 350,000 | 17% |
| Richmond, VA | 58,000 | 400,000 | 15% |
| San Francisco, CA | 230,000 | 1.6 million | 14% |
| Austin, TX | 48,000 | 380,000 | 12% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN | 160,000 | 1.3 million | 12% |
| Charlotte, NC | 64,000 | 560,000 | 11% |
| Atlanta, GA | 100,000 | 910,000 | 11% |
Some of these top metropolitan areas don’t surprise me, and a lot of them are the same cities with the highest central business district employment: New York City, San Francisco, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Atlanta.
Other than these areas, it appears that mid-sized cities like Louisville, Indianapolis, New Orleans, and Richmond have some of the highest downtown job concentrations. This might be because these metropolitan areas are smaller geographically and have smaller total workforces. If the central business districts in these cities are fairly large, it’s easier to take up a larger proportion of the metropolitan area.
Another interesting trend within these cities is that five of them are state capitals: Indianapolis, Richmond, Austin, St. Paul, and Atlanta. It’s possible that for these cities, a lot of the labor force is concentrated in the public sector. Oftentimes, government offices are located close together or even in the same buildings as each other. This could be part of the explanation for why some of the cities with large labor forces–like Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Boston–are missing from this list. If more of the jobs in these cities are private, they aren’t as compelled to be concentrated in a certain area.
Some of these metropolitan areas–like New York City, San Francisco, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Atlanta–have high-ranking public transit systems. The other cities may be candidates for public transit improvement. If a lot of workers are travelling to the central business district regularly for work, high-quality public transit is important for accessibility, reducing congestion, and reducing emissions.
