The Connection Between Public Transit and Employment

Urban transit systems in most American cities…have become a genuine civil rights issue-and a valid one-because the layout of rapid-transit systems determines the accessibility of jobs to the Black community. If transportation systems in American cities could be laid out so as to provide an opportunity for poor people to get meaningful employment, then they could begin to move into the mainstream of American life. A good example of this problem is my home city of Atlanta, where the rapid-transit system has been laid out for the convenience of the white upper-middle-class suburbanites who commute to their jobs downtown. The system has virtually no consideration for connecting the poor people with their jobs. There is only one possible explanation for this situation, and that is the racist blindness of city planners. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1986, pp. 325-326) Much attention is being paid to the role of public transit in employment-related mobility for urban residents, yet there is very little evidence of the degree to which one affects the other. Little research has focused on how labor participation is affected by increases in urban workers' access to public transportation. Research on the spatial mismatch hypothesis has dealt with the relationship between labor participation and the spatial separation of workers' residences from suitable jobs; however, most analyses concentrate on commuting time or distance as a function of auto use. Few studies have considered the impacts of public transportation on labor participation. This article describes a study analyzing the locations and employment characteristics of workers with varying levels of access to public transit. Using census data and a variety of spatial measures generated by a geographic information system (GIS), a two-stage least squares regression was used to estimate the relationship of access to public transit with labor participation levels for Portland, Oregon, and Atlanta, Georgia. The results suggest that access to public transit is a significant factor in determining average rates of labor participation within these two cities.