Bad public transit isn't just inconvenient; it keeps people from jobs

It makes intuitive sense that good access to trains and buses in a big, dense city would make people better off economically. If you can easily reach more jobs, you have more opportunities. A new study tests this theory in the Big Apple and finds evidence that this is true. People with the most access to jobs via public transit do pretty well for themselves, as do people in far-flung areas who largely commute by car. But the people with the least transportation access — those at the intersection of low levels of both car-commuting and public transit access — appear to do the worst.

In the study, from NYU’s Rudin Center for Transportation, researchers ranked New York City neighborhoods by how many jobs their residents can reach within one hour on public transit on a Monday morning. What they found is that neighborhoods in the middle of the job-accessibility spectrum had the lowest median household incomes and highest unemployment rates.

Meanwhile, jobs at in the top third of the distribution have by far the highest median income of the three groups — $79,148, more than $30,000 higher than people in the middle third — and the lowest unemployment rate. At the low end of the spectrum, incomes are also relatively high, at $61,000, and the unemployment rate is two full points better than for people with medium access to transit.

People in the middle find themselves in a sort of no-man’s-land of both jobs and transit: they have “enough transit access to commute effectively, but insufficient transit options to provide significant job opportunities, leading to the city’s highest unemployment rates and lowest incomes,” the researchers write.

And if you think of income as a rough proxy for housing costs, it makes sense. The cheap neighborhoods in any city are often the ones that make it hard to hop onto a train or bus, while an expensive apartment is centrally located (like in much of Manhattan) and a short walk from a subway station.

It’s true that New York City, which is huge, dense, and has a well-integrated and highly effective public transit system, isn’t exactly analogous to other cities. Mitchell Moss, one of the study’s authors, points out that New York in particular has advantages over other cities: it has flat train fees, no matter how far you travel (unlike, for example, Washington, DC) and the subway never closes (unlike the trains Boston and many other cities).

But Moss points to less accessible neighborhoods in New York, like Red Hook, there are lessons for other cities:

“We need to link transit to areas that aren’t likely to get a new subway system — using ... a variety of buses, more customized buses to link people to the mass transit system,” he says. “In some cases it’s getting people to mass transit that’s the challenge.”

The lesson is that a city trying to boost its economy by boosting jobs has only undertaken half the battle — people have to be able to get to those jobs.