Working Far From Home: Transportation and Welfare Reform in the Ten Big States

Abstract

Transportation assistance for low-income workers is complex, expensive, and rife with unintended consequences. Policymakers confuse ends and means when job access strategies are too focused on public transit systems. The policy challenge is helping low-income workers get to distant jobs on difficult schedules, but too often both policymakers and decisionmakers act as if the challenge is devising a way to make public transit good enough to serve the reverse commutes of low-income workers. This represents both a bias and a blind spot. The bias lies in our willingness to consign poor people to barely functioning public systems from which higher-income citizens routinely withdraw (as in public schools, public health, public safety, and public space). The bias is expressed in the overheard comment of one senior official from a national public transit organization, Show me a thirty-year-old man on a bus, and I'll show you a failure.