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TPO staff demos commuter‑flow tool and highlights Knoxville MSA population growth
Summary
TPO staff demonstrated a new commuter‑flow digital tool that maps origin‑destination commuter patterns in the combined statistical area and provided Census updates showing the Knoxville MSA at about 968,000 residents, with Knoxville city surpassing 200,000.
Emily Jackson, research assistant on TPO staff, demonstrated a new commuter‑flow digital tool at the June 24 TPO Executive Board meeting and summarized recent Census population updates. Jackson said the Knoxville Metropolitan Statistical Area now totals about 968,000 residents, an increase of roughly 60,000 since 2020, and that the city of Knoxville surpassed 200,000 residents for the first time.
Jackson walked board members through the tool’s features: an interactive origin selector, dot‑map visualizations of commuter destinations, county totals and a matrix table that shows county‑to‑county commuter flows. The tool draws on the Census LODES dataset and TPO travel‑demand outputs to show how many people live in one county and work in another and to visualize industry employment distributions.
Jackson cautioned that the LODES data contain headquartering distortions—where large employers’ administrative addresses may not reflect daily work locations—and recommended treating the outputs as planning‑grade estimates rather than precise counts. "There are things you need to be careful about. These are estimates. They're not perfect," Jackson said.
What the tool shows: examples discussed by the board included tens of thousands of daily workers who both live and work in Knox County and notable commuter flows between Knox County and neighboring counties (for example, thousands of daily commutes to and from Anderson and Sevier counties). Jackson said staff will distribute the tool link and presentation materials to board members.
Why it matters: the tool gives planners and elected officials an accessible way to explore commuter patterns, test scenarios and prioritize chokepoints, enabling more targeted short‑term operations and long‑range investment decisions.
Next steps: TPO staff will provide the tool link and presentation materials to board members and maintain the dataset for future analyses. The demonstration concluded without action items or votes.
