How many jobs can you reach by car from each part of the region, leaving home in the morning rush? Start with your own address, then click around the map to compare places.
Address search sends only what you type to OpenStreetMap's free lookup service (map data © OpenStreetMap contributors). "Use my location" asks your browser first and never leaves your device. Your place is saved only in this browser.
The typical neighborhood in each place. Click a bar to zoom the map there.
Each dot is a neighborhood. Places good for job seekers tend to be good for employers too. Drag a box to light those neighborhoods up on the map; click empty space to clear.
What the overall score means. A job next door counts as one whole job. A job farther off counts as part of a job, because fewer people drive that far. The discount follows how Americans actually commute by car: a job 22 minutes away counts as half a job, and one 45 minutes away counts as about a sixth. Trips over 60 minutes count for nothing.
Where the numbers come from. Drive times for an 8:00 a.m. Wednesday departure with traffic. Jobs and workers from the Census Bureau's 2023 workplace and home-location counts (LEHD LODES). Households from the 2019 to 2023 American Community Survey. The "neighborhoods" on this map are Census tracts, areas of about 4,000 people each, using the Census Bureau's 2020 outlines.
Read job totals as relative. Across the whole country, this release counts about 293 million jobs at workplaces but about 147 million workers at homes, close to two to one. The Richmond region shows the same ratio (1.37 million jobs, 683,000 workers). The cause is not yet known. Because the gap looks even everywhere, comparisons between neighborhoods should hold, but the raw job counts may run about twice too high.
Region. The Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area as drawn in 2018: the cities of Richmond, Petersburg, Hopewell and Colonial Heights, and Amelia, Caroline, Charles City, Chesterfield, Cumberland, Dinwiddie, Goochland, Hanover, Henrico, King and Queen, King William, Louisa, New Kent, Powhatan, Prince George and Sussex counties. Reach still counts jobs outside this line, such as in Fredericksburg or Charlottesville.
Source. Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Commuter Market Access Dataset (database), accessed 11 October 2026. Data prepared by Willem Klumpenhouwer.