Examining disparities in excess commuting across residential neighborhood types

Keywords: excess commuting, urban form, residential neighborhood, disparities, CTPP
Session Type: Virtual Poster Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 57

Abstract

Excess commuting reflects a city’s overall commuting efficiency by quantifying the proportion of non-optimal commute that would be avoided if resident workers could freely swap houses or jobs in a given urban form. This framework has been widely used to evaluate urban land use and transportation policy decision-making. One major methodological limitation in the excess commuting literature is that most existing studies establish on an oversimplified assumption of homogeneous resident workers/jobs, which neglects the complexity of residential (and employment) location choices. To fill this gap, this article develops a methodology to measure excess commuting across worker subgroups differentiated by residential neighborhood type, which captures the comprehensive socioeconomic profiles of workers defined based on multiple attributes. Based on a cross-sectional study of Portland, Boston, New Orleans, and Detroit, it is found that the traditional method overestimates the commuting benchmarks and causes a biased evaluation of commuting efficiency performance. The theoretical minimum commute is more sensitive to the disaggregation analysis compared to the commute upper bound (i.e., the random commute and maximum commute), leading to an overestimation of excess commuting ranging from 25.5% to 27.1%. Moreover, this article reveals significant disparities in excess commuting across different neighborhood types and identifies three representative subgroups of distinctive excess commuting patterns, which are the traditional suburban subgroup, new starts subgroup, and socioeconomically disadvantaged subgroup. With this proposed methodology, more effective and heterogeneous policies targeting different population subgroups could be developed.