Disability, wages, and commuting in New York

Abstract

In the U.S., substantial employment and wage gaps persist between workers with and without disabilities. A lack of accessible transportation is often cited as a barrier to employment in higher wage jobs for people with disabilities, but little is known about the intraurban commuting patterns of employed people with disabilities in relation to their wage earnings. Our study compares wages and commute times between workers with and without disabilities in the New York metropolitan region and identifies the intraurban zones where residents experience higher inequities in wage earnings and commute times. We obtained our data from the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the American Community Survey (ACS) for the 2008–2012 time period. We used linear mixed-effects models and generated separate models with log hourly wage or one-way commute time as the dependent variable. We find significant differences in wages and commute times between workers with and without disabilities at the scale of the metropolitan region as well as by intraurban zone. At the metropolitan scale, disabled workers earn 16.6% less and commute one minute longer on average than non-disabled workers. High commute and wage inequalities converge in the center, where workers with disabilities are more likely to use public transit, earn 17.1% less, and travel nearly four minutes longer on average than workers without disabilities. These results suggest that transport options are less accessible and slower for disabled workers than they are for non-disabled workers. Our findings indicate a need for more accessible and quicker forms of transportation in the center along with an increased availability of centrally located and affordable housing to reduce the disability gap in wages and commute times. We also find that workers with disabilities generally seek higher wages in exchange for longer commute times, but the results differ by race/ethnicity and gender. Compared to white men, minority workers earn much less, and white and Hispanic women have significantly shorter commute times. Our findings offer new geographic insights on how having a disability can influence wage earnings and commute times for workers in different intraurban zones in the New York metropolitan region.

Cost of Living Variation, Nonmetropolitan America, and Implications for the Supplemental Poverty Measure

“…Our analysis adopts the assumption used in the SPM that metropolitan and nonmetropolitan are a reasonable scale for geographic adjustment. Based on work highlighting the variation between costs of living just within the New York City region, it is clear that cost of living is not just variable between metropolitan areas but is quite variable within metropolitan areas (McLafferty & Preston, 2019;Wong et al, 2020). Beyond metropolitan areas, counties in the United States can be quite large and have varying degrees of rurality not captured purely through population size and adjacency to urban areas.…”

How Time Inefficient and Uncertain are Paratransit Trips Compared to Car Trips

“…Groups who are not able to drive or take fixed-route public transit and depend on paratransit are much more likely to be denied equal opportunity, full participation in society, independent living, and economic selfsufficiency (11). Wong et al (15) found that in New York, transport options are less accessible and slower for disabled workers than they are for non-disabled workers, and workers with disabilities request higher salaries in exchange for commute times. Brucker and Rollins (16) discovered that workers with disabilities who have similar commute times to workers without disabilities earn substantially less per hour.…”

Sustainable future: A systematic review of city-region development in bay areas

“…Transportation and its economic implications in the bay areas require increased academic attention as manufacturing employment has been transferred to the service sectors and this process in bay areas is no exception (Wong et al, 2020). The changes in employment accessibility, to some extent, indicate the degree to which land use and transportation bridge the gap between work possibilities and labor forces.…”