The Equity Factor

Good Luck Cutting Down On Your Transportation Costs In the Bay Area

A new study finds that low-income workers in the Bay Area spend 24 percent of their income on transportation alone.

A BART station in downtown Oakland. Credit: Russell Mondy on Flickr

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The Bay Area has the highest combined annual average of housing and transportation costs in the nation — at $36,206, according to a new study. Of that, the average household spends $13,350 a year on transportation. Even more disconcerting? The average low-income Bay Area household spends 24 percent of its income on transportation alone.

That’s 6 percent higher than the national average, and car dependency likely accounts for this difference. When you’re forced to drive — 84 percent of Bay Area low-income households own a car — you have to take on the extra burden of maintenance, gas, payments and insurance. As the study notes, the annual cost of owning even a small car averages to about $6,500. Minimum wage simply doesn’t cut it.

Below, you can see how the Bay Area stacks up with average annual housing and transportation costs. It’s 19 percent more than in New York, which every New Yorker will tell you is the most expensive city in the world.

The study, from Reconnecting America and Urban Habitat, explores the barriers low-income workers face when trying to gain employment that offers any sort of upward mobility. Transit access, as one might expect, is a chief concern. The Bay Area’s three concentrated job centers — San Francisco, Oakland and Santa Clara County — do present many opportunities across the wage scale. But as the chart below shows, the average weighted density of high-wage jobs (which pay more than $40,000 a year) comes out to about 32 jobs per acre, while low-wage jobs ($15,000 or less) average 4.7 per acre.

That’s a big problem when looking at transit-oriented development (TOD). A high-density job center like San Francisco or downtown Oakland is more of a priority when it comes to transit and infrastructure investments, since more people means more ridership. Low-wage jobs tend to be in less dense places, which creates a problem for commuters who rely on walking, biking or mass transit. And low-income workers are more likely to use transit to get to work.

The most staggering yet unsurprising numbers are how income level correlates with commute time, a problem common to many cities. In the Bay Area, 35 percent of people who make $20,000 or less spend an hour or more commuting, nearly double that of workers who make between $20,000 and $40,000.

One of the biggest problems in all of this is what the authors call the first and last mile. “While the Bay Area has an extensive rail system including BART, Caltrain, MUNI, Altamont Commuter Express, Capitol Corridor, and VTA,” they write, “the ‘first-mile’ from home to rail or ‘last-mile’ from rail to work is a hard gap to bridge for many low-income workers.”

So how do you bridge that gap? Corporate shuttles to tech companies in Silicon Valley are often exclusively for full-time employees. That means contract workers like food service and janitorial staff are squeezed out of an easy (and free!) ride to work. If companies loosened the rules and were more inclusionary, it would give low-income workers a quicker route to work and put less people on the roads into Santa Clara County every day.

The study suggests that the Bay Area look at state-level policies like the New Jersey Transit Hub Tax Credit. TOD is hugely important to creating an equitable city and reducing congestion, but you can’t simply dole out tax credits to big companies — which very likely provide a wealth of jobs above that $40,000-a-year line — who might only be moving their headquarters 10 miles down the road.

“Don’t create some new subsidy that you think is going to get you this new high and noble purpose,” Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, told me in May. “Go back and fix the rules of existing programs.”

There’s a lot more to this than commute length and density. The time of day that many low- and middle-wage workers commute complicates the issue. If you’re working a graveyard shift or super early, transit might not run as regularly. But the root of the problem remains: The working poor and middle-wage earners are spending nearly a quarter of their income on transportation to get to jobs that offer little opportunity of making more.

The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.

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Bill Bradley is a writer and reporter living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Deadspin, GQ, and Vanity Fair, among others.

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Tags: public transportationjobseconomic developmentsan franciscoincome inequalitypovertyequity factortransit-oriented developmentsilicon valley

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