Measuring Job Accessibility Through Integrating Travel Time, Transit Fare And Income: A Study Of The Chicago Metropolitan Area

Abstract

Job accessibility, as a crucial social equity indicator, has been primarily measured by travel time/distance and transit fare. However, the effect of income has rarely been integrated with the total travel monetary cost (i.e. the sum of transit fare and travel time monetary cost) in measuring job accessibility. The different sensitivity to travel cost of people with different income levels should be included in job accessibility measures. This study proposes a measure that turns travel time, transit fare and income into a comparable unit and considers the total travel monetary cost as a percentage of income. We measure transit-based accessibility to low-pay jobs in Chicago before and after considering the total travel monetary cost as a percentage of income. The results indicate that the job accessibility for low-income people is overestimated while the job accessibility for non-low-income people is underestimated based on the traditional measure. The proposed measure mitigates the overestimation and underestimation effects and helps better inform policy-makers of the real job accessibility distribution pattern.