Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Commuter town
Summary
A commuter town is a populated area that is primarily residential rather than commercial or industrial. Routine travel from home to work and back is called commuting, which is where the term comes from. A commuter town may be called by many other terms: "bedroom community" (Canada and northeastern US), "bedroom town", "bedroom suburb" (US), "dormitory town", or "dormitory suburb" (Britain/Commonwealth/Ireland). In Japan, a commuter town may be referred to by the wasei-eigo coinage "bed town". The term "exurb" was used from the 1950s, but since 2006, is generally used for areas beyond suburbs and specifically less densely built than the suburbs to which the exurbs' residents commute.
Often commuter towns form when workers in a region cannot afford to live where they work and must seek residency in another town with a lower cost of living. The late 20th century, the dot-com bubble and United States housing bubble drove housing costs in Californian metropolitan areas to historic highs, spawning exurban growth in adjacent counties. , over 80% of the workforce of Tracy, California, was employed in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In some cases, commuter towns can result from changing economic conditions. Steubenville, Ohio along with neighboring Weirton, West Virginia had an independent regional identity until the collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s. Steubenville Pike and the Parkway West also created easier access to the much larger city of Pittsburgh. In 2013, Jefferson County, Ohio (where Steubenville is located) was added to the Pittsburgh metropolitan area as part of its larger Combined Statistical Area.
In Japan, most of the national railway network was privatized by the 1980s but unlike in the UK, both the national railway's tracks, trains, stations and real estate were included in the privatization agreements. Japan's privately operated railroads view real estate investment and development of commuter towns as central to their business model.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.