{"id":7526,"date":"2015-03-26T15:37:10","date_gmt":"2015-03-26T19:37:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.myparkingsignblog.com\/blog\/?p=7526"},"modified":"2023-08-02T02:25:32","modified_gmt":"2023-08-02T06:25:32","slug":"commute-feels-longer-probably","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myparkingsign.com/blog\/commute-feels-longer-probably\/","title":{"rendered":"Your commute feels longer because it probably is"},"content":{"rendered":"

Does it feel like your commute is getting longer? It probably is. A new study from the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program<\/a>, The Growing Distance Between People and Jobs in Metropolitan America<\/em>, discovers that as people and jobs headed to the suburbs in the 2000s, the number of jobs located near the average resident dropped. And people\u2019s proximity to jobs can impact more than simply commuters\u2019 moods — in fact, it can affect local fiscal health as well as residents’ employment options, especially among low-income and minority workers.<\/p>\n

\"Commuting\"<\/a>

Image by Stewart Butterfield<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Jobs started shifting out of city centers in the 2000\u2019s. As Elizabeth Kneebone and Natalie Holmes, the study’s authors, point out, that decade “ushered in significant demographic and economic changes that have redrawn the map of economic opportunity in metropolitan America” — jobs declined due to two economic downturns, and jobs moved further outward within the country’s biggest metro areas. In fact, jobs shifted away from the urban center of nearly every major metro area.<\/p>\n

People followed the shifting jobs, with the poor and minorities sub-urbanizing most quickly; by 2010, “every major ethnic and racial group and the majority of the poor lived in suburbs for the first time,” explain the authors. These two moves — of people and of jobs — changed the proximity between people and their jobs, and “often not for the better.” Why is proximity important? Most significantly, the nearness of jobs can impact the employment outcomes of residents. The closer one lives to a job, the more likely one is to work; those who live closer to jobs also have shorter employment searches and shorter periods of unemployment.<\/p>\n

Being close to work is especially significant for certain types of residents and workers; for instance, the length of unemployment among black, female and older workers is usually more related to job accessibility than for other types of workers. And for poor workers, living closer to work boosts their chances of working and getting off welfare. Lower-income and lower-skill workers also benefit from living closer to jobs since they tend to struggle more with housing and commuting costs. Higher-income and higher-skill workers tend to be able to afford cars; commuting by car means that these higher-income workers have a greater choice in where they live and work, and more opportunities since they don’t need to restrict their job search to their immediate neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

For this study, the authors drew up a national database of local-level demographic and private-sector employment data (private-sector jobs make up 84% of all jobs in the U.S.), as well as data from U.S. Census Bureau reports. They used census tract level data on commutes to pinpoint a typical commute distance within metro areas as well as for the non-metropolitan areas of each state. As for job proximity, they measured how many jobs were located within the typical commute distance of the center of each census tract they studied.<\/p>\n

So, what did the researchers discover? A few key findings include:<\/p>\n