Does better job accessibility help people gain employment? The role of public transport in Great Britain

Jeroen Bastiaanssen, Daniel Johnson and Karen Lucas
Additional contact information
Jeroen Bastiaanssen: University of Leeds, UK
Daniel Johnson: University of Leeds, UK
Karen Lucas: University of Manchester, UK

Urban Studies, 2022, vol. 59, issue 2, 301-322

Abstract: The combined decentralisation of many firms and services and the increasing concentration of traditional public transport services in the main corridors of urban centres have made it more difficult for people to access jobs, in particular when residing outside these prime accessibility areas. This is the first national study within the context of Great Britain to examine whether better public transport job accessibility, modelled at the micro level of individuals, improves employment probabilities for people living in Great Britain. While previous studies have typically concentrated on US metropolitan areas, our study uses British national employment micro datasets to assess which urban and rural areas and population groups would benefit from better public transport services. In an important departure from most standard accessibility methodologies, we computed a public transport job accessibility measure applied nationwide and combined this with individual-level employment probability models for Great Britain. The models were corrected for endogeneity by applying an instrumental variable approach. The study finds that better public transport job accessibility improves individual employment probabilities, in particular in metropolitan areas and smaller cities and towns with lower car ownership rates and in low-income neighbourhoods. It further shows that mainly lower educated groups and young people would benefit from better public transport job accessibility. The findings in this study are important for policymakers in that they imply that, in particular, job seekers who rely on public transport services may benefit from more targeted public policies to improve their accessibility to employment and thereby their social mobility.

Keywords: accessibility; employment; Great Britain; job seekers; public transport; å ¯å Šæ€§; 就业; 英国; æ±‚è Œè€…; 公共交通 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00420980211012635 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:59:y:2022:i:2:p:301-322

DOI: 10.1177/00420980211012635

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().