From Tech Transfer Newsletter, Winter 2002 » printer-friendly

Reverse Commute Transit Programs And Single Mothers On Welfare: A Policy Mismatch?

UCLA Urban Planning Professor Evelyn Blumenberg recently completed a study of the spatial mismatch between welfare recipients in inner cities and new job opportunities in the suburbs. According to her study, Federal Transit Administration (FTA) initiatives to improve access to suburban jobs in order to help inner city welfare mothers find jobs appear to miss the mark. She found that there are jobs for low-wage, female workers in most urban centers and that single mothers try to avoid long reverse commutes by bus because of childcare and household responsibilities.

Transportation programs designed to assist welfare participants and other low-wage workers with traveling to and from jobs are largely based upon research regarding the spatial mismatch between the residential location of low-income communities, disproportionately concentrated in central city neighborhoods, and the increasing concentration of low-wage jobs in the suburbs. During the Clinton Administration new regulations and several policy initiatives were established to overcome this mismatch and help low-income families travel to work. However, much of the research that suggested the effectiveness of these so-called reverse commute programs focuses on African American men. It excludes women entirely. Contrary to popular opinion, there is limited evidence to base the notion that reverse commute transit services will help adult welfare recipients transition to work. Eighty percent of this group are women.⁽¹⁾

Recent research shows that most welfare recipients commute only short distances to their jobs. Low income women with children (most welfare recipients being single mothers) may have a compelling reason not to work too far from home. Long travel times make it difficult for working mothers to balance work commitments with household responsibilities and emergency childcare. And many low-wage jobs remain in the central city. While buses are well-suited for the travel needs of welfare recipients in job- and transit- rich neighborhoods, automobiles may better meet the needs of single mothers who must commute longer distances from inner city to suburb and also shepherd children to school and day-care located near their residence. New programs that more fully incorporate the particular travel needs of women with children are needed.

Transportation Policies and Spatial Mismatch -- A Brief History

In the 1960s, John Kain, Professor of Economics and Afro-American Studies at Harvard, suggested that low-skilled African Americans living in central city neighborhoods were jobless for several reasons, including a shift in the demand for low-wage labor to suburban locations; racial discrimination in housing in the suburbs; and poor transportation linkages between cities and suburbs. This idea, and the hard evidence identified to support it, set the foundation for public policies designed to enable low-income, central city residents to overcome spatial barriers to employment. Three principal strategies have been developed in this regard:

1. dispersion strategies to increase housing opportunities for low-income residents in the suburbs;
2. place-based strategies to develop economic opportunities in central cities where low-income residents live; and
3. mobility strategies to connect the inner-city poor to suburban jobs.

This last strategy, essentially a transportation "fix", has been the focus of a number of demonstration projects. The Bridges to Work program, a joint project of Public/Private Ventures and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), was designed to connect inner-city residents with suburban employment opportunities by providing job placement and transportation services. The Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA), a national group focused on rural and paratransit issues, organized the National Joblinks Employment and Transportation Initiative. This project, funded by FTA and the U.S. Department of Labor, tested a variety of transportation strategies to help unemployed and underemployed people reach economic self-sufficiency.

A Crisis Brews

Welfare reform was a key policy initiative of the Clinton Administration. In 1996 Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act transforming the provision of social assistance. A new program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), requires welfare recipients to find employment and offers temporary financial aid and short-term employment assistance to help people transition to the labor market. When working became a requirement, policymakers seized on transportation solutions as a quick, effective fixbased on the simple assumption that if welfare recipients can physically get to where the jobs are, they can find and keep them. The spatial mismatch idea stood behind this policy. Researchers used overlapping maps to show the spatial mismatch and decided that since inner city welfare recipients could not afford cars, that transit should be used to get them to appropriate (low-paying) suburban jobs. The US DOT and CTAA actively promoted this solution. Major studies on this process in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles and New York helped focus public attention on this solution. In 1998 Congress made the Job Access and Reverse Commute program a part of TEA- 21 and authorized $150 million annually to assist states and localities in developing transit services to fill the spatial gap.

A Mismatched Hypothesis

But what if these reverse commute transit solutions do not actually serve the needs of most welfare recipients? What if a single mom cannot fit an 8-hour suburban workday combined with a lengthy transit commute into her children's daycare schedule? What if she could get to her job more quickly and pick up her kids in the same time if she only had a car? A number of scholars have noted that the spatial mismatch phenomenon varies considerably across metropolitan areas and it affects men and women differently. What if the more widespread problem is traveling to jobs located within the central city? The conclusion? One size does not fit all. There is a lingering assumption that the rapid growth of jobs in the suburbs goes hand-in-hand with a concomitant decline in central city jobs. In fact, during the 1990s, central city employment grew at five times the rate of the centralcity population, with the most rapid growth occurring in the service sector, just the sector where most welfare recipients find employment. In addition, while most studies tend to emphasize only the growth of new jobs in suburban areas, many real job vacancies result from existing job turnover. This is especially true in the service sector. In Boston, for example, job turnover accounted for 95 percent of all job opportunities in 1990. Most jobs were concentrated in the inner city.

So the solution for single mothers on welfare living in the central cities is probably not long bus rides to the suburbs. Even streamlined reverse commute services -- such as specialized vanpools -- can still result in relatively long commutes on fixed schedules that make them equally hard to integrate with child care needs. Arduous commutes combined with parenting responsibilities most likely will result in even higher job turnover rates.

The Supporting Evidence

The 1995 National Personal Transportation Survey (NPTS) found that the average commute trip length for all US workers was 12 miles. On average, commutes made by welfare recipients are significantly shorter. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Transportation found that twothirds of all trips made by single parents fell within only a threemile radius of home.

And generally, the travel behavior of women differs from that of men. Women in general are disproportionately responsible for household- sustaining activities including trips to the day care center, the grocery store, and other similar destinations. Women tend to make more trips than men do. Women tend to work closer to home, probably to ease the difficulty of balancing paid work and household responsibilities. Welfare participants, most of who are women, also have these responsibilities. They too have reasonable fears about having to work far from their children and want to be able to return home or get to their child's school quickly if something unexpected arises during working hours.

Take the Car

For welfare recipients, who must commute to suburban work locations, cars, and not public transit, may be the most efficient way to travel. This idea, of course, runs contrary to the motivations of many urban planners, who typically seek to reduce societal dependence on automobiles and to create environmentally friendly or "sustainable' environments by promoting public transit.

Cars do however offer the flexibility that low-income single mothers need to balance work with family. For many women, job opportunities in the service and retail sector can also involve off-peak hours, just when transit service is limited or after darkness falls and concern for personal safety is highest. Cars also allow for trip-chaining -- making several stops on the way to a final destination. More women than men engage in trip-chaining, such as stopping for groceries on the way home. Welfare recipients with reliable access to automobiles often view their travel as relatively problem-free. Indeed studies show a strong positive relationship between employment and access to automobiles. Cars are linked with higher employment rates, in terms of both numbers of hours worked per week and monthly earnings.

Barriers to Car Ownership

Cars though are not problem-free solutions. The barriers to car ownership can be high. The costs of purchasing a car and related costs of insurance, maintenance, repairs and fuel can present a real obstacle for low-income women. Many states limit vehicle ownership for welfare recipients forcing them to drive only older, more unreliable cars and thus contributing to the problem of getting to work. In California, for example, state regulations limit welfare participants to vehicles with values no greater than $4,650.

In conclusion, there are no cookiecutter transportation solutions that will get welfare recipients to work. Since most welfare recipients are women, and many of these single mothers, their distinctive needs must to be taken into account. Though unrelated to transportation, social policies which insure a living wage would also contribute to a long-term solution. Certainly transportation policies should not penalize welfare participants for their poverty by directing them into modes of transportation that may not be well suited to their needs.

Evelyn Blumenberg is Assistant Professor at UCLA's School of Public Policy and Social Research in the Department of Urban Planning. She has written extensively on the impacts of transit programs on low income women.

¹Approx 68% are single parents with children and most of these are women. The data on marital status and sex are not cross-tabulated either for the U.S. or for California.

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