Impact of income on urban commute across major cities in US

Abstract

Commuting could be costly, while acceptable costs vary across populations. This way, it might be easier for high-income commuters to accept a longer-distance commute having more flexibility in transportation choices and costs. Previous researches provided a statistical description of the gap in the commuting distance in different groups and modelled transportation choices based socioeco-nomic characteristics, but lacks experiments in measuring the capability of distance in discouraging commuting in different income groups. This paper quantifies the heterogeneity of distance’s sensitivity on urban commuting networks by modelling flow volume among different income groups. We analyze the gravity models of the commute flows in 12 major US cities and describe the inconsistency in high-income and low-income workers’ commute behavior. By comparing coefficients in the best fit models, we find that commute decay with distance in 11 out of 12 cities is significantly slower for high-income groups than for low-income groups. Results could help urban planners and transportation engineers to assess equitability in planning public transit and land use.