Transit Accessibility and Labor Force Participation Rate of At-Risk Groups: DadeCounty

摘要

This report examines whether transit accessibility to jobs from individualtraffic analysis zones has an impact on employment of different racial/ethnic groups. Demonstrations of cross-town bus routes making suburban employment more accessible have been well-used by people traveling to suburban jobs, supporting the idea that transit accessibility may make a difference. Earlier literature on spatial mismatch theory suggests that transit accessibility should make a difference in unemployment rates for African-Americans confined to inner city ghettos. In contrast, more recent literature uses theory to discount the importance of transportation accessibility in lowering unemployment, and empirical observation supports the theory. Because in all of these studies transit accessibility was not measured precisely, this study attempts to do so. Accessibility is measured as employment in all regional traffic analysis zones, each inversely weighted by the square of the door-to-door transit travel between the zone where the employment is and the zone whose accessibility is being measured. This measure of accessibility is then used as one of several explanatory variables in models of African-American, Hispanic white, and non-Hispanic white unemployment, work trip transit mode split, and automobile ownership in traffic analysis zones for Dade County, Florida. This research finds that transit accessibility does not explain African-American unemployment directly, but on the margin it explains African-American transit mode split to work, and it has a very important inverse relationship in models of automobile ownership in Dade County.