WORK-PLACE UTILITIES AND COMMUTING PATTERNS: ARE THEY CLASS OR PLACE DIFFERENTIATED?*

The work-place utilities and commuting patterns of the employed in Haifa's (Israel) metropolitan field are analyzed using the value-stretch methodology. Statistical test scores reveal class and place (location) variations in the perceived utilities of employed, especially in their commuting patterns (flows). A meaningful commuting pattern analysis should incorporate socioeconomic and demographic elements along with the spatial distribution of job opportunities. Some analytical and policy implications of employment strategies for a postindustrial metropolis are evaluated.     

Effects of Married-Couple Dual-Earner Households on Metropolitan Commuting: Evidence from the Atlanta Metropolitan Area

The idea of creating a balance between jobs and housing within different commuter catchment areas of a metropolis has been a prominent approach for reducing traffic congestion, air pollution, and journey-to-work times. Married-couple, dual-earner households, in which both spouses are employed, have been identified as an obstacle to the job-housing balance concept because of their constrained ability to choose a residential location near both workplaces. However, this has not yet been conclusively tested. Drawing on the 2000 5% PUMS dataset for metropolitan Atlanta, this article examines the commuting behavior of such households relative to single-earner households. The results challenge the dominant assumption that the average commutes of married-couple, dual-earner households are necessarily longer than those of single-earner households. In fact, after controlling for all forms of socioeconomic factors in the analysis, this study shows there are either no significant differences, or if there are, the average commutes of single-earner households are longer. It is a lack of affordable housing near job locations, or vice versa, and not the presence of dual-earner households, that should be blamed for lengthening commuting time and difficulties in implementing job-housing balances.     

COMMUTING DIRECTIONALITY,A FUNCTIONAL MEASURE FOR METROPOLITAN AND NONMETROPOLITAN AREA STANDARDS

The daily journey to work is ubiquitous in American life. Portraying commuting behavior graphically at the subcounty level, however, has been hampered by technical obstacles. With desktop GIS and new analytical tools, the spatial particulars of commuting can be given clarity. This paper explores the use of a spatial statistic, the mean weighted direction of journey-to-work flows, to aggregate and depict commuting at the census tract level for the purpose of delineating metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. Using 1990 census data for Iowa, tract-to-tract flow vectors and resultant vectors are calculated and drawn for each census tract, and a set of functional areas for the state is produced. The research suggests that the concept of commuting directionality is a community characteristic requiring further attention. Directionality may be a useful component in a census-tract-level national settlement classification system made possible with disaggregated data and annual updates through the American Community Survey. [Key words: metropolitan areas, commuting, GIS, census tract, settlement classification.]     

PATTERNS AND PROBLEMS OF COMMUTING TO PERIPHERAL URBAN WORKPLACES IN SINGAPORE: CASE STUDY OF SINGAPORE AIRLINES' EMPLOYEES

This paper addresses the issue of commuting patterns and problems to workplaces in the urban periphery of Singapore. It is based on a case study of journey-to-work patterns of employees of Singapore Airlines Limited (SIA). The company's headquarters is in Airline House which is situated in the eastern comer of Singapore, a location which suffers from accessibility problems. The paper focuses on mode choice in the journey-to-work and, by means of a questionnaire survey, examines commuting patterns of a sample of Airline House workers in terms of first, the characteristics of the different modes of transportation used; and second, the socio-economic characteristics of workers including factors such as income, gender, occupational status and age. This is followed by a discussion of the problems faced in the daily commutes of workers. Many of these problems such as inconvenient public transport services, traffic congestion and long transit times are representative of those of other peripheral workplaces in Singapore. Based on the findings of the case study, the paper discusses some policy implications of the government's planning efforts to decentralise office activities from the CBD to suburban regions.     

Geo-temporal Twitter demographics

This paper seeks and uses highly disaggregate social media sources to characterize Greater London in terms of flows of people with modelled individual characteristics, as well as conventional measures of land use morphology and night-time residence. We conduct three analyses. First, we use the Shannon Entropy measure to characterize the geography of information creation across the city. Second, we create a geo-temporal demographic classification of Twitter users in London. Third, we begin to use Twitter data to characterize the links between different locations across the city. We see all three elements as data rich, highly disaggregate geo-temporal analysis of urban form and function, albeit one that pertains to no clearly defined population. Our conclusions reflect upon this severe shortcoming in analysis using social media data, and its implications for progressing our understanding of socio-spatial distributions within cities.     

Travel From Home: An Economic Geography of Commuting Distances in Montreal

The question of how home and workplace are linked through commuting is at the heart of much recent work on metropolitan areas. However, the emphasis tends to be either on spatial-economic models or on the impact of empirically measured individual, household, neighborhood, and transport mode characteristics; relatively little work has focused on job characteristics and place of employment as they relate to travel to work. In this article, I investigate whether people travel different distances to access different types of job location, with particular attention to the different distances traveled by men and women. My points of reference are the major employment centers (poles) in the Montreal region. After controlling for a wide range of explanations that may account for different travel distances, I conclude that differences in commuting length between different places of work are, by and large, independent of possible explanatory factors such as residential location, economic sector, occupation, income, and participation in household earnings—some places of work generate longer commutes than others. Men and women behave differently in relation to these places: women will travel farther to access jobs in centers whereas men will not; and despite their shorter average overall commutes, women travel farther than men to reach jobs in the CBD. This suggests, at the metropolitan scale, that each job location may have its own local culture or "milieu," and that men and women react differently to them.     

A Review of “The Experience of Return Migration: Caribbean Perspectives”

Abstract

Commuting in Italy has always been addressed without regard to gender differences. Following the issuance of a comprehensive database by the National Statistical Institute, it is now possible to analyze gender differences in personal mobility for the first time in Italy. For our analyses we used Local Labor Systems (LLS) zoning in lieu of administrative zoning. LLSs are territorial subdivisions based on the principle of a self-contained labor market and are widely used in Italy. This article also reports the results of a multidimensional data analysis aimed at highlighting relations between different gender-based commuting patterns and a set of variables (education level, age, household structure, occupational category, and position, etc.). The analysis points out gender differences in the relationship among commuting and socioeconomic characteristics, reveals that these relationships are in turn related to the economic structure and geographical context of different regional labor markets, and suggests to analysts that they be sensitive to singular context when interpreting the meaning of gender differences in commuting.

     

Job Access and Commute Penalties: Balancing Work and Residence in Los Angeles

There is an ongoing debate about whether minorities and women pay a commute penalty—that is, do these groups commute farther for lower wages than White males? Research based on commuting time has suggested that minority women bear the multiple jeopardy of race and gender in their journey-to-work behavior. The present study re-examines those findings. We show that minority women who commute longer distances have higher earnings. There is a positive or in some cases neutral relationship between distance and earnings. This suggests that we treat the notion of a commute penalty with some caution. However, women still do not earn as much as men and they are relatively if not absolutely disadvantaged in the commuting process. As expected, for women as for men, skill is a major factor in earnings gains, and relying on public transportation negatively affects earnings. In the past decade it has been fashionable to focus on the negative impacts of commuting on women, but the evidence from this study suggests that the shorter commutes by women may be an expression of the way in which families balance work and residence.     

Job Proximity and Accessibility for Workers of Various Wage Groups

This research proposes two indexes, job proximity and accessibility, to measure workers' location advantage by residences with respect to their job markets. Job proximity is designed to capture the spatial separation between residents and jobs. Job accessibility measures one's ability to overcome such separation as may be affected by transportation means, road network, congestion, and intensity of competition for jobs among workers. The research compares the two measures among workers of various wage levels in an attempt to reveal who has the greatest advantage in job access and whether job access is a spatial or nonspatial issue. In Cleveland in 1990, the mean wage rate of 30,000 was a critical turning point: below this level, the higher the mean wage rate in a residential area, the farther the area was away from jobs; above this level, the trend is reversed. In other words, below a wage threshold, workers tend to trade better and more spacious housing (usually farther away from jobs) for more commuting; but above the threshold, workers retreat for saving in commuting (pertaining to their high opportunity cost of commuting). Although low-wage workers enjoy better job proximity, many of them (particularly some inner-city residents) have the worst job accessibility because of their limited transport mobility as indicated by a low level of automobile ownership. Job proximity declines with distance from the CBD and conforms to the monocentric model, as does job accessibility but to a less degree. Since workers with various wages respond differently to job access, the distribution of mean wage rates in the metropolitan area is hardly monocentric.     

Commuting and Gender in Italy: A Methodological Issue*

Commuting in Italy has always been addressed without regard to gender differences. Following the issuance of a comprehensive database by the National Statistical Institute, it is now possible to analyze gender differences in personal mobility for the first time in Italy. For our analyses we used Local Labor Systems (LLS) zoning in lieu of administrative zoning. LLSs are territorial subdivisions based on the principle of a self‐contained labor market and are widely used in Italy. This article also reports the results of a multidimensional data analysis aimed at highlighting relations between different gender‐based commuting patterns and a set of variables (education level, age, household structure, occupational category, and position, etc.). The analysis points out gender differences in the relationship among commuting and socioeconomic characteristics, reveals that these relationships are in turn related to the economic structure and geographical context of different regional labor markets, and suggests to analysts that they be sensitive to singular context when interpreting the meaning of gender differences in commuting.     

Study on the synergy between intra-urban resident’s migration and job change in Beijing

People’s decisions of residential mobility in housing market and decisions of job change in labor market play an essential role in the formation and dynamics of urban spatial structure. This paper investigates the relationship between residential relocation and job change and its heterogeneity using a large-scale survey of residential living satisfaction and preferences in Beijing. Several conclusions are drawn as follows: 1) People’s decisions of residential mobility are significantly positively correlated with their decisions of job change, indicating that these two-dimensional decisions are in fact a correlated decision process rather than two independent decision processes. 2) There is heterogeneity in the correlated decisions of residential mobility and job change. More specifically, the interrelationship between the decisions of residential mobility and job change among people without Beijing hukou, renters and single-worker households is more intensive than people with Beijing hukou, homeowners and multi-worker households. In addition, there is heterogeneity in the determinants of residential relocation and job change between groups with different types of housing tenure, household registration status and family employment structure. 3) For renters, commuting time can significantly increase the probability of residential relocation, which indicates that residents of different socioeconomic attributes have very different responses to commuting time costs.     

GENDER,RACE, AND COMMUTING AMONG SERVICE SECTOR WORKERS*

The generality that women work closer to home and have shorter commuting times than men needs to be assessed for racial groups. Statistical analysis of commuting times for a large sample of service workers in the New York metropolitan area shows that black and hispanic women commute as far as their male counterparts and their commuting times far exceed those of white men and women. Workplace factors, such as income, occupation, and job accessibility, are important in explaining these findings.     

兰州市职住空间组织特征

以兰州市为实证研究对象,基于2010年兰州市内1 500份家庭调查问卷数据基础上,利用地理信息系统技术,对兰州市居民的职住空间组织特征进行实证研究。研究发现兰州市居民的居住地和就业地之间的平均距离为2.34 km,有一半居民的通勤距离在1 km内,和北京、上海、广州等东部大城市相比,兰州市的通勤距离比较短,还没有出现类似东部大城市的职住分离比较突出的现象。兰州市作为多中心、带状组团城市,各组团内部就业与居住基本平衡,居民通勤多以本组团内部的通勤行为为主,没有出现大规模的跨区通勤,各组团居民的通勤行为具有“近多远少”特点。各组团职住空间特征存在明显的差异,城关区和安宁区的平均通勤距离较短,七里河和西固区的平均通勤距离较长。职住空间组织特征与城市中居住功能和就业功能的空间差异有关。城关区属于单向外来通勤流为主的区域、七里河区属于双向通勤流比较平衡的区域、安宁区和西固区属于单向外出通勤流为主的区域。     

A Review of “Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina”

Women's earnings, employment, and commutes have generally lagged men's. Geographers emphasize the effects of women's gender roles on their spatial entrapment as limiting their job opportunities and labor market status. This research methodologically advances spatial entrapment research by utilizing a national model of commuting with spatial fixed effects to make more accurate predictions and generalizations. Second, this research found that a control group of same-sex partners allows for more direct isolation and measurement of the gender role effect on women's commutes. This research concluded that women's gender roles are negatively affecting their commuting range and, therefore, their labor market status.     

市场转型背景下北京市中低收入居民的住房机会与职住分离研究

基于北京市9个不同类型中低收入社区的600位就业者的问卷调查数据,通过构建多元线性回归模型,验证了住房机会（住房搬迁机会）以及就业机会（工作单位类型）等市场转型过程中的制度性因素对中低收入者就业可达性的影响。研究表明,北京市中低收入居民中,国有企业单位及非国有企业单位就业者相对于行政事业单位就业者,显著地承受更大程度的职住分离,体现出单位制度残留的持续影响。由于政府保障性住房项目而搬迁的中低收入居民职住分离程度最大,而因个人原因发生居住搬迁的中低收入者职住距离则相对较近。拥有北京市户口的本地内生型中低收入者、非户主低收入者、男性低收入者的职住分离程度显著更大。最后,北京市中低收入者的月收入与其职住距离成显著正相关,表明市场因素开始发挥作用,但当考虑了住房搬迁机会变量后,部分市场化因素的影响不仅减弱并且变得不显著,而制度性因素的影响变得更强且统计上显著。由此说明,对于转型期的城市中低收入者而言,计划经济下再分配制度的残留与路径依赖以及城市空间的结构性调整对其职住关系的影响更为显著。     

广州市过剩通勤的相关特征及其形成机制

在不改变目前城市结构的前提下, 通过模拟居民的居住与就业区位的最优组合获取理论上的最小通勤, 过剩通勤是实际通勤成本与最小通勤成本之间的差值, 它反映了城市通勤效率和潜力。利用线性规划函数, 以广州市为例, 利用2001 年和2005 年家庭调查问卷数据, 计算两年的过剩通勤分别为58.41%和44.74%, 这部分通勤是可通过优化居住与就业的区位组合而理论上可节约的。过剩通勤与家庭社会经济特征有关, 尤其与家庭收入、户籍类型、 住房产权和类型等密切相关, 家庭结构分化和收入分化是产生过剩通勤的重要原因。除受模型假设产生的误差影响外, 过剩通勤的产生还受社会经济体制改革、城市规划与建设及个人 的居住与就业偏好等因素的影响; 住房、国企和土地等相关制度的改革导致城市居住与就业空间重组、城市规划较少关注小区域范围内居住与就业的平衡、个人的择居和择业偏好的变化, 这些因素相互影响、相互作用, 共同对过剩通勤的产生和扩大产生重要影响。     

Race,Gender, and Constrained Work Trips in Buffalo,NY, 1990

This study investigates whether women's short commutes should be interpreted as constrained or convenient work trips by examining how race, gender, travel mode, occupation, residential location, workplace location, and Inc.ome affect commuting time. The analysis is restricted to a sample of European American and African American male and female workers residing in Buffalo, New York, and the surrounding county using data drawn from the Public Use Microdata Samples of the 1990 U.S. census. Given the pervasive gender wage gap, women unsurprisingly have more compromised (short commutes to low-Inc.ome jobs) work trips than do men. Multivariate analysis reveals that among those who reverse commute to suburban locations, African American women have the longest work trips.     

人口密度对居民通勤时耗的影响及条件效应——来自上海证据

基于上海市1 605个居民抽样样本,利用多层次线性回归模型,探讨了街道尺度人口密度对个体居民通勤时耗的影响及条件效应。在控制了个体社会经济属性、通勤方式和其他建成环境要素后发现,高人口密度总体上会增加居民通勤时耗,而且其作用是有条件的,主要受“设计”“地铁站可达性”“到就业中心距离”和“通勤方式”的调节。具体而言,提高街道路网密度和高速路密度,缩短居住地到就业中心距离,提高地铁站密度,鼓励居民采用地铁方式通勤,减少小汽车使用,都可以显著降低人口密度对通勤时耗的增加作用。因而,通过优化城市建成环境和调节人口密度来降低过长的通勤时耗是可行的。     

Race,Gender, and Constrained Work Trips in Buffalo,NY, 1990

This study investigates whether women's short commutes should be interpreted as constrained or convenient work trips by examining how race, gender, travel mode, occupation, residential location, workplace location, and Inc.ome affect commuting time. The analysis is restricted to a sample of European American and African American male and female workers residing in Buffalo, New York, and the surrounding county using data drawn from the Public Use Microdata Samples of the 1990 U.S. census. Given the pervasive gender wage gap, women unsurprisingly have more compromised (short commutes to low-Inc.ome jobs) work trips than do men. Multivariate analysis reveals that among those who reverse commute to suburban locations, African American women have the longest work trips.