Spring, 1998, Vol. 4, No. 2

Second Place: Colver-Rosenberg Award

Transportation and the road to Employment

By Amy Rynell, a second-year Social Administration student at SSA. Her field placement is at the Heartland Alliance for Human Rights and Human Needs.

Child care and transportation are two of the most frequently mentioned barriers for women transitioning from welfare to work. Currently, child care issues are being addressed by many facets of the social work profession. Social workers have been much slower to respond to public transportation issues. Public transportation, which on the surface does not appear to be a typical social work issue, theoretically represents some typical social work values: access, mobility and links to opportunity. Using Chicago as an example, this article discusses the current problem, the policy history that has contributed to the development of the problem and steps towards solutions that attempt to put transportation issues back onto the social work advocacy agenda.

The Problem

The city of Chicago has experienced a rapid decentralization of jobs. A 1994 study published by the Illinois Department of Employment Security reported that suburbs gained 50,000 jobs from 1992 to 1993 while Chicago lost 8,700 jobs. Another study reported that in 1996, two out of every three job openings in the Chicago metropolitan area were located in the suburbs (CHIP 1996). Chicago faces a situation of having many unemployed people in the city seeking jobs, and many jobs being located in suburban areas not reachable by public transit. The current public transportation infrastructure is centered around getting people from the edge of the city and outlying suburbs to the city center and is not designed to serve many of the new job centers in the region.

While most of the suburbs are reachable by commuter rail, the stations are not near the job centers and there is often no public transportation from the majority of these stations to the job sites. Transit planners argue that providing public transportation in these outlying areas would not be cost effective. Transit planners estimate that a minimum of 4,000 people per square mile are needed to run buses efficiently. None of Chicago's collar counties come close. Another option available to get people to these suburban job sites is by automobile, but the high costs of automobile ownership is prohibitive for people who have low incomes. Based on AAA information adjusted for an older model vehicle and not including purchase price, it would cost between $300 and $400 per month for a city worker commuting to the suburbs to own and operate a car. Ten of the 12 community areas in Chicago with the highest unemployment rates also have very low auto ownership rates, with at least 50 percent of the households having no access to a vehicle.

History

This problem has been developing for decades. Past policy decisions have led to a spatial mismatch between available entry level jobs and available entry level employees. Perhaps the most powerful policy influence on the metropolitan region is the legacy of federal support for decentralization and growth.

The Federal Highway Act of 1916 and the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 moved the government toward a transportation policy emphasizing and benefiting the road, the truck and the private motorcar. In conjunction with cheap fuel and mass produced automobiles, urban expressways led to marginal transport costs and greatly stimulated deconcentration (Kenneth Jackson, 1985).

The impact of policy legacy does not pertain solely to road building policies but also to housing laws and zoning. For instance, the Federal Housing Authority policy hastened the decay of inner-city neighborhoods by giving the middle class options to move elsewhere. States contributed to decentralization by giving localities the power to design their own zoning laws. This delegation of land use regulation by the states impeded later efforts to bring about more coherent land use policies (Robertson and Judd, p. 293). These policies, combined with exclusionary zoning, opened the door to suburban expansion and habitation by the upper and middle classes while those with lower incomes were bound to the city limits.

Options for Change

So what can social workers do to respond to this transportation deficiency? One thing we can do is to become knowledgeable about the planning process for transportation decisions. There are a number of agencies working on increasing access of low income transit riders to the planning process, and their efforts can be bolstered by our support. A brief primer of the main players and terms used in transportation funding and planning has been included in a sidebar to this article (see page 17).

Another thing we can do as social workers is advocate for the addition of transportation components to job training and other programs. Here are three existing innovative programs and ideas that can guide our efforts.

* Suburban Job-Link is an employment and transportation company founded in 1970 in Chicago. Its mission is to link residents of inner-city neighborhoods with good employment opportunities. SJL's services include a temporary employment business, an express bus service between the city and job rich areas in the suburbs, a neighborhood based rideshare network, employment counseling and a network to enable city residents to identify suburban job openings for others in their neigh-borhoods.

* In Ventura County, California, a program will soon offer low interest car loans to welfare recipients, guaranteed by the county and financed by the public credit union. Aging cars will be donated by local businesses and made road ready by community college automotive students. Dealerships and car clubs will "adopt" welfare families and provide free repairs (NY Times, 11/18/97).

* Employee Commute Options(ECO) is a mandate of the Clean Air Act Amendment that requires employers of 100 or more to develop and implement a plan that encourages employees to commute to work without driving alone. Employers can meet the regulations in many ways including subsidizing transit costs for employees, providing shuttle services between train stations and job site, centralizing vanpool and carpool matching services.

* Transportation links could be established between public transportation stations and job-sites. These could be paid for with a small contribution from employees, subsidized by employers or fully funded by the Regional Transit Authority, which oversees all public transportation in the Chicago region.

* The current spatial mismatch has a history that implicates both transportation and housing policies. Issues of unemployment, transportation and housing are complex and interrelated. In the short run, we can work on alleviating this mismatch through programs like the ones mentioned above. In the long run, a comprehensive strategy that includes incentives for revitalization and job growth in our central cities is needed. Because transportation issues are inextricably linked to the needs of the people social workers serve, we need to play a vital role in both the short and long term solutions.

REFERENCES

1. Gross, Jane (1997, November 18) Getting to jobs in suburbs is hard for walking poor. The New York Times, pp A1, A19.
2. Henderson, Harold (1996, September 6) Up against the sprawl. The Reader, pp1, 16, 18-25.
3. Jackson, Kenneth (1985). Crabgrass Frontier. New York: Oxford University Press. Northeastern Illinois Planing Commission (NIPC) (1992). Employment and population forecasts.
4. Robertson, David and Judd, Dennis (1989). The Development of American Public Policy. Glenview, IL: Scot, Foresman and Company.
5. The Chicago Institute on Urban Poverty (Revised 1/96) "The Power to Shape the Future" Chicago, IL: Heartland Alliance for Human Rights and Human Needs.

Amy Rynell, a second-year Social Administration student at SSA. Her field placement is at the Heartland Alliance for Human Rights and Human Needs.

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