Building reverse commute typologies through urban and suburban socioeconomic characteristics

Abstract

The problem of employment access for the urban poor is often articulated across the urban-suburban divide in metropolitan areas, such that job opportunities concentrate in suburban areas, at a distance from areas of concentrated, racialized poverty in the inner city. The lack of public transit options that reasonably connect urban workers to suburban job opportunities only furthers this problem. However, transportation scholars have noted that a substantial population of the urban poor take this “reverse” commute. While these studies have grown knowledge on the characteristics of the reverse commuting population and their journey to work, they do not address, to the same extent, the demographic characteristics where reverse commuters live in the city and where they work in the suburbs. To learn more about the equity issues in the reverse commuting problem, this paper uses cluster analysis to develop typologies of commutes based on differences in key socio-demographic indicators between home (origin) and work (destination) geographies. This paper analyzes how commute patterns (intra-urban, suburb-city, etc.) and the number of jobs nested within these commute patterns, concentrate across socio-demographically defined commute typologies. Focus is given to how reverse commutes are distributed across these typologies. Reverse commutes constitute approximately 10% of all commutes in our sample and 10% of all primary jobs (the job that provides a worker the most income of all of their jobs) in the sample are accessed via reverse commute. The paper concludes with a number of transportation and social policy interventions that address issues facing particularly low-income, minority, reverse commuting workers. In light of the literature on metropolitan fragmentation, we recommend redistributive policies that build suburban, municipal accountability to urban, low-income reverse commuters.