Transit Mobility, Jobs Access, and Low-Income Labor Participation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

Portland State University, Portland OR

Investigators

Abstract

This project will examine whether low-income workers experience low levels of accessibility to public transportation and employment in six U.S. metropolitan areas. The project will estimate the extent to which public transportation is linked with marginally employed persons and their job locations. This will be done by comparing public transportation and employment access measures for current and past Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) recipients. TANF recipients represent the target population of welfare-to-work initiatives. Compared to other low-income persons, they are the most likely to have limited levels of transportation mobility. The analysis will control for a variety of personal characteristics such as race, gender, length of unemployment, and educational attainment as primary factors affecting unemployment. An empirical model will be developed to estimate the likelihood that a person became employed and exited the TANF as a function of these characteristics and public transit access measures. This project represents the first cross-sectional analysis of how public transportation and employment access affect employment opportunities for low-income persons. Both the descriptive and multivariate statistical results will describe the effects of employment and public transportation accessibility and clarify areas where policies aimed to increase mobility can have the greatest impact. While analyses similar to this research have been conducted in some U.S. cities, disparate methodologies and data types do not allow the results to be compared across cities. Policy-makers continue to allocate significant resources to welfare-to-work mobility initiatives while having little to base their expectations for success. The analysis of the six proposed metropolitan areas will provide generalizable results that will be of interest to many other metropolitan areas, social service agencies, transportation providers, and researchers concerned with the success of welfare-to-work initiatives.