Diverging Mobility Situations: Measuring Relative Job Accessibility and Differing Socioeconomic Conditions in New York City

Diverging mobility situations in Greater Mexico City: Exploring the factors behind the mobility situations of public transport commuters

“…Except for wormholes in both poverty and non-poverty workers – which locate in the suburban periphery and along major highways – and long commutes for the poverty workers – which locate in peripheral areas – all other mobility situations in Denver Metropolitan Area are located randomly across the urban region and without a salient spatial pattern. The spatial distribution of mobility situations in the cases of New York City (López-García and Baker, 2023) and MCMZ (López-García, 2023) are more similar to each other. In both cases the short commute tracts are in the central areas of their metropolitan regions and closer to job concentrations.…”

“…The authors found that the racial and immigrant composition of census tracts has considerable influence across all the mobility situations. My study is different from that of López-García and Baker (2023) in that I build a hierarchical model to assess how the influence of transport, land-use and socio-economic related variables change as groups of variables are introduced to the models.…”

“…While the model developed by Niedzielski and Boschmann (2014) has been successful in mapping mobility situations, the factors driving the likelihood of experiencing a specific mobility situation remain understudied. In the sole article on the subject so far, López-García and Baker (2023) assessed how socio-economic characteristics influence mobility situations in New York City while controlling for transportation infrastructure and land-use patterns. The authors found that the racial and immigrant composition of census tracts has considerable influence across all the mobility situations.…”

“…Shearmur (2006) found that gender plays a key role in travel distance, as women will travel further than men to access jobs in employment subcentres. An extensive body of literature highlights the role of race in explaining commuting disparities (Hu, 2022; McLafferty and Preston, 2019; Preston and McLafferty, 2016; Sultana, 2005), highlighting how Black and Latino workers tend to have a more costly mobility situation than White workers (López-García and Baker, 2023).…”

“…Looking at the relationship between time and distance in the journey to work, Niedzielski and Boschmann (2014) identify four categories of mobility situations and hold that workers in particular locations might experience different travel times than expected for a given travel distance. While the model has been successfully applied to identify diverging mobility situations in Denver (Niedzielski and Boschmann, 2014), New York City (López-García and Baker, 2023) and Greater Mexico City (López-García, 2023), the analysis of the factors behind the different mobility situations remains understudied.…”