The research presented in this paper explores, in the French context, the hypothesis that employment problems experienced by low-skilled jobseekers are partially caused by spatial urban factors. Many low-skilled workers live in poor neighbourhoods where they are exposed to a distressed social environment and/or weak job accessibility. For reasons discussed in this article, living in such neighbourhoods may increase the duration of unemployment for jobseekers. On the basis of an empirical study, this hypothesis is tested in the Paris-Ile-de-France metropolitan area and addresses the question: all other things being equal, are low-skilled workers living in high-poverty neighbourhoods and/or neighbourhoods with low job accessibility exposed to a greater risk of long-term unemployment?

Many social scientists consider improvements in urban travel facilities during the last decades of the 20th century to have signifi cantly weakened proximity constraints, and therefore think that home-workplace proximity is no longer a major factor in household location choice. They believe that better transport conditions give households more freedom in selecting their homes and workplaces, regardless of the distance separating these two locations. It is argued that this point of view underestimates the costs of daily commuting (which remain an increasing function of trip length), and consequently overestimates households' tolerance to commuting. The author's aim is to measure how much weight households give to home-workplace proximity in actual location choices. With the aid of survey data from the Paris-Île-de-France metropolitan area, two values are estimated: (i) the share of home and workplace changes (observed between 1991 and 2002) which either bring home and workplace closer to each other or keep these two places close to each other, and (ii) the 'life expectancy' of job-residence combinations which impose long-distance commutes.

Urban planners have explored many solutions for reducing the energy and environmental costs of daily mobility in cities and one of them is to encourage households to embrace more efficient commuting patterns. As research on "excess commuting" has shown, the spatial distribution of housing and jobs in many cities would theoretically allow much shorter commuting distances than are actually observed. The question this paper tackles is how a more efficient commuting pattern would affect the transport modes workers use to travel to work. If workers and jobs were rematched in such a way as to minimise average commute distance, how would such a change impact the way people travel to work? While one might easily imagine an increase in the share of trips covered by soft modes of transport, there are reasons to believe that in some cases there might also be unexpected outcomes such an increase in car use. So how would people travel to work in a city where there is no "excess commuting"? We looked for an answer to this question through empirical simulations in the case of the Paris Metropolitan Area. Highlights  An original way to explore the issue of excess commuting  A simulation-based approach to estimating the share of car use in trips-towork under the hypothesis of commute minimisation  Pioneering research on excess commuting in the case of the Paris Metropolitan Area  In the Paris Metropolis, cutting average commuting distance could result in an increase in commuting by car  Minimising commute length converts many long-range trips by public transport into mid-range trips by car

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