Tracking accessibility: employment and housing opportunities in the San Francisco Bay Area

Shifts in job accessibility reflect, in part, the degree to which land use and transportation decisions help bring job opportunities closer to labor f orces. In this paper we argue for the wider use of accessibility indicators as part of the long-range transportation planning process. As a case examp le, changes in job accessibility indices are traced for the San Francisco B ay Area from 1980 to 1990, computed for 100 residential areas and the regio n's 22 largest employment centers. Indices are refined based on occupationa l match indicators that weigh the consistency between residents' employment roles and labor-force occupational characteristics at workplaces. The anal ysis reveals that peripheral areas tend to be the least job accessible. Mor eover, employment centers that are home to highly skilled professional work ers are generally the most accessible when occupational matching is account ed for. This is thought to reflect the existence of housing markets that ar e more responsive to the preferences of upper-income workers. Our analyses also show that residents of low-income, inner-city neighborhoods generally face the greatest occupational mismatches. Through a path analysis, the var iable 'race' was found to be far more strongly associated with unemployment than was job accessibility, however, even after controlling for educationa l levels and other factors. We conclude that an important purpose of tracki ng changes in accessibility is to provide feedback on the degree to which r esource allocation decisions in the urban transportation field are helping to redress serious inequities in accessibility to jobs, medical facilities, and other important destinations.