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

该项目将调查美国六个大都市区的低收入工人乘坐公共交通和就业的可达性是否较低。该项目将估计公共交通与边缘就业人员及其工作地点的联系程度。这项工作将通过比较目前和过去向贫困家庭提供临时援助的受助人的公共交通和就业机会措施来完成。TANF受助人代表了从福利到工作计划的目标人群。与其他低收入人群相比，他们最有可能受到交通机动性的限制。分析将控制各种个人特征，如种族、性别、失业时间长短和教育程度作为影响失业的主要因素。将开发一个经验模型，以估计一个人受雇和退出TANF的可能性，作为这些特征和公共交通进出措施的函数。该项目首次对公共交通和就业机会如何影响低收入者的就业机会进行了横断面分析。描述性和多变量统计结果都将描述就业和公共交通可达性的影响，并阐明旨在增加流动性的政策可以产生最大影响的领域。虽然在美国的一些城市已经进行了类似的分析，但不同的方法和数据类型无法对不同城市的结果进行比较。政策制定者继续将大量资源分配给从福利到工作的流动倡议，而他们对成功的期望却很少。对六个拟议的大都市区的分析将提供可概括的结果，这将对许多其他大都市区、社会服务机构、运输供应商和关注福利工作倡议成功的研究人员感兴趣。

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.