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Both mobility and proximity influence transportation accessibility, but they exist in tension with each other. To understand the region-level trade-off between mobility and proximity requires intermetropolitan comparisons of accessibility. With a focus on the two metropolitan cases of San Francisco and Washington, D.C., we first describe a method for comparing regional accessibility and then explain a method that separates out the effects of mobility and proximity on regional accessibility. We find that the San Francisco region enjoys an accessibility advantage over Washington largely because of faster highway speeds but that central Washington offers an advantage in proximity.

A preface and a bus rider's story: "twotiered" transit system in the making? magine a bus stop in a typical workingclass neighbourhood of inner-city Los Angeles, a city with an extraordinary array of peoples and cultures. The bus pulls up with standing room only, filled with a variety of people: Mexican, Salvadoran, Korean, Filipino and African American; men and women going to jobs, some of them janitors, some street vendors. People on the bus include women clutching children and grocery bags, kids going to school, elderly folks off to the Senior Centre. The ride is like always: hot, noisy and desperately crowded. The riders come from decidedly different backgrounds, yet share the same experience daily-jostled against one another, staring blankly out cracked windows, minding their own business, intent on getting where they need to go. And getting it over with as quickly as possible. In another part of town, people of a different income class are riding in a new train. They come from the suburbs, clacking away at laptops and sipping cappuccino on their way to downtown jobs. These are people taking advantage of what Mike Davis (1995, p. 270) calls "the biggest public works project in fin de siecle America", an ambitious series of commuter rail lines that were budgeted at $183 billion over 30 years (Sterngold, 1999). These train riders choose to leave their cars at home to avoid the maddening freeway jams of Los Angeles. Some ride the train on principle. Trains are, after all, better for the environment. Back on the inner-city bus … someone's handing out leaflets and talking about forming a union-of bus riders? First in English then in Spanish, the organizer tells riders how the train that's always in the newspapers is costing more than planners expected, and that politicians now propose to take money away from buses to keep building the train lines. Then the organizer talks about racial discrimination. Racial discrimination? What do buses have to do with racial discrimination?

Racial minorities and low-income households are confined to the urban core of many metropolitan regions in the United States while a growing share of jobs is located at the suburban periphery. Yet many studies of transportation accessibility find that these social groups are not disadvantaged in their ability to reach jobs because central locations are a benefit in the metropolitan competition for jobs. To what extent is the ability to reach jobs different among categories of race, ethnicity, income, and poverty status? A comparison is made among social groups using an innovative method of accessibility incorporating household income-level to account for the vast difference in accessibility between the modes of automobile and public transit. Most racial minorities and low-income persons are found to be advantaged in their ability to reach jobs, but a troubling number are nevertheless extremely disadvantaged by virtue of lacking an automobile in spite of residing in advantaged locations.

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