Racial/Ethnic Residential Segregation, Socioeconomic Inequality, and Job Accessibility by Public Transportation Networks in the United States

This paper examines the access that neighborhoods have to jobs via public transit, if it varies by race/ethnicity, and what difference it makes in terms of socioeconomic outcomes. Decades of research has argued that important sites of employment are often not located in or are inaccessible to racial/ethnic minority neighborhoods. Here, we examine this proposition and take into account how public transit may play into this process. On the one hand, public transit as a public good may have the power to overcome the liabilities of place. If we can build transportation systems that give all neighborhoods comparable access to jobs, part of the spatial mismatch problem may be corrected. On the other hand, if public transit is built in such a way that certain racial/ethnic groups are benefiting, but not others, access alone is not enough to achieve parity. Using the 2013–2017 American Community Survey and the 2017 Access Across America Transit study, we examine how neighborhood racial/ethnic composition is related to job accessibility and socioeconomic outcomes at the block group level for 49 of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. We find that Black and Latino neighborhoods have access to fewer jobs via public transit, and that they also have lower median household income and a higher unemployment rate, net of access to jobs. Access to more jobs via mass transit is related to higher incomes in White block group clusters, but has no impact on household incomes in Black and Latino clusters. This suggests that public transit as implemented serves to aggravate existing inequalities and is not currently acting as a policy tool to ameliorate inequality.