Has suburbanization diminished the importance of access to Center City?

Nine years ago, the Business Review examined the role that access to Center City Philadelphia played in people's choices about where to live and how to commute. Using 1980 census data, that analysis concluded that access to Center City by both car and public transportation shaped people's choices in important ways. But since 1980, the Philadelphia metropolitan area has undergone a great deal of change, including a decentralization of both population and employment. In this article, Dick Voith revisits the questions first posed almost a decade ago to see how employment and population shifts influenced people's choices in the 1990s.