Access to jobs : transportation barriers faced by low-skilled autoless workers in U.S. metropolitan areas

One of the major concerns in today's urban labor market is spatial mismatch, the geographic separation between jobs and workers. Although numerous studies examine spatial mismatch, most of them focus on inner-city minorities, and the spatial mismatch problem for all autoless workers in a metropolitan area as a whole has not been well explored. Focusing on low-skilled workers and welfare recipients, this dissertation explores and quantifies the importance of job accessibility in employment outcomes for disadvantaged workers without autos in U.S. metropolitan areas. Metropolitan areas studied are Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles for low-skilled workers and Los Angeles for welfare recipients. An essential component of the analysis is the calculation of improved job-access measures that take into account supply and demand sides of the labor market and travel modes. The resulting measures indicate that, contrary to the perception of many spatial mismatch studies, central-city areas still offer more of a geographical advantage in accessing employment opportunities than suburban areas, despite the substantial suburbanization of employment. In other words, spatial mismatch is greater in suburban areas than in central-city areas. The measures also indicate that the levels of spatially accessible job opportunities are considerably lower for transit users than for auto users. In other words, spatial mismatch is much greater for transit users than for auto users. This transit/auto disparity is much greater than the central-city/suburb disparity, suggesting that the mode of travel has greater importance in determining job accessibility than location.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2002

Author dc:creator

• Kawabata, Mizuki, 1972-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Frank Levy.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8520

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8520