Return of congestion and reduced transit service lead to lower job access nationwide

Congested vehicle traffic on an urban street

Access to job opportunities declined in large US cities as economic and transportation conditions have continued to evolve in the COVID era, according to new research from the Accessibility Observatory at the University of Minnesota. The annual Access Across America (AAA) study uses comprehensive walking, biking, transit, and auto travel data to analyze the sustainability of these transportation options for residents of major urban areas.

Accessibility measures the interaction between land use and transportation networks, capturing the ease with which travelers can reach a desired destination. Typically, land use and transportation networks change only gradually from year to year, but 2022, as noted in the prior travel year’s report, illustrated a much different dynamic. 

The AAA reports, using census jobs data available for the 2022 travel year, show generally lower access to jobs than in 2021 for residents using biking, transit, and autos. In part, this reflects the reconfiguration and reduction of job numbers and locations in the early COVID era—most urban areas had fewer total jobs available in this report than in the prior year’s analysis. Nonetheless, the strength and underlying causes of the loss of these opportunities differ by travel mode and place. 

All top 50 most-populous urban areas in the US saw reduced access to jobs during the morning peak by driving (auto). The greatest reductions in access to opportunity were associated with those places for which congestion had increased the most. For example, compared to 2021, the typical worker in the Los Angeles region lost access to 1.2 million jobs within a 30-minute drive—a 40 percent reduction. Similar patterns were observed in Boston (33 percent reduction) and Atlanta (28 percent reduction), among other cities. These drastic changes measure the impact of the return of traffic, magnified by the difference from unusually high job accessibility by auto during the first 21 months of the pandemic.

Explore a new interactive map highlighting the 2022 AAA findings

“Travel habits are sticky, and, during COVID, it was unusually easy to travel across many urban areas by car, which wasn’t sustainable,” says Observatory senior researcher Andrew Owen, lead author of the reports. “What follows is increased demand as people get used to being able to make trips quickly. Then, those travel times become longer as more people make the same choice. Reduced accessibility due to congestion is simply the consequence of this negative feedback loop.”

Heat map of the US showing access to jobs by auto
Access to jobs by auto within a 30-minute travel time

Los Angeles, New York, and Dallas remained the top three urban areas for auto access to jobs in the latest report. That means that despite high congestion, residents with a car and the means to operate and park it would still find the best overall access to destinations in these urban areas. San Jose and Chicago—also with notable congestion impacts on accessibility—rounded out the overall top five best places to reach opportunities with a car. Places such as  Riverside, California, and Miami, on the other hand, placed in the top five for the worst congestion impacts, while appearing far down the list in overall access to opportunity. In urban areas like these, the burden of slow travel is not offset by the number of opportunities that can be reached in a reasonable time. 

The 2022 reports also recognize the importance of modes that might provide more sustainable access to destinations by analyzing jobs reachable via walking or rolling, biking, and public transit. The walk report—the first national calculation of job walkability since 2014—reveals the importance of urban form and pedestrian connections in the largest US cities. The top five cities for job walkability (New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle) share density and a job-housing mix that provides the highest access to jobs by pedestrians. Still, access is highly variable within these urban areas, with some residents having very high accessibility by walking or rolling,but most having very little. Even in the New York City urban area, the average resident would expect to reach fewer than 1 percent of regional jobs in a 30-minute walk or roll. 

Accessibility Observatory researcher Shirley Liu, an AAA report co-author, says it also is important to consider who has the benefit of high job access by walking. 

“So often we hear that walkable areas are signs of high income or even gentrification, but we know from travel behavior that lower-wage workers are the ones who are more likely to walk to work,” Liu explains. “When we look into the data, we find some places actually have better walking access to jobs for those lower-wage workers.” In places such as  Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Cleveland, for example, lower-wage residents have better connections by walking or rolling to jobs in the city than do higher-wage workers.

Overall, the recently published data reveals how changes in travel behavior also can indicate the sustainability of the transportation system in each urban area. For example, partly because of the ease of driving the open roads induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, those open roads could not last. In addition, more environmentally sustainable options like walking and biking continue to be unevenly distributed within and across cities. And reductions of accessibility followed reductions of transit service in many urban areas in 2022, pointing out that the financial sustainability of modes is another dimension to consider. 

The annual research project, conducted since 2014, is sponsored by the National Accessibility Evaluation pooled-fund study, a multiyear effort led by the Minnesota Department of Transportation and supported by partners including the Federal Highway Administration, 11 additional state DOTs, and the Metropolitan Council of the Twin Cities.

The Accessibility Observatory, a program of CTS, is the nation’s leading resource for the research and application of accessibility-based transportation system evaluation. Visit the Observatory website for the Access Across America research reports for auto, transit, walking, and biking and associated publicly available data.

—Eric Lind, Accessibility Observatory director 

Subscribe

Sign up to receive our Catalyst newsletter in your inbox twice every month.

Media Contact

Michael McCarthy
612-624-3645