The Influence of Transit Accessibility to Jobs on the Employment Prospects of Welfare Recipients: The Case of Broward County,

The passage of welfare reform renewed a long-standing debate over whether improved public transit would significantly lessen the length of time that people remain on welfare. Language of the act reflects an assumption that it would. On the other hand, the automobile provides such a high level of service and is so widely available even to the poor that it is difficult to comprehend how improved public transportation would make a difference to the employability of the poor. Studies addressing this issue do not achieve consensus, we argue, because of methodological issues, particularly in measuring transit accessibility and in the use of aggregate vs. disaggregate data. In this paper we introduce a measure of transit accessibility addressing what we believe to be shortcomings of earlier measures. We use it in a disaggregate analysis of welfare recipients in Broward County, Florida and find that there is a statistically significant association between transit accessibility and length of time on welfare. A one percent improvement in transit accessibility reduces the amount of time that the average welfare recipient is on welfare by one day.