Search Results
Working Paper
Urban Transportation and Inter-Jurisdictional Competition
It is well-known that competition for factors of production, including competition for residents, affects the public services provided in the communities. This paper considers the determination of local investment in urban transport systems. Many specialists question the effectiveness of the current U.S. top-to-bottom transportation institutional arrangement in which the federal government plays a dominant role and recommend a shift toward a decentralized organization. We examine how such a shift would affect the levels of transport investment. Specifically, we consider a model of two cities, ...
Journal Article
District Digest: Transportation Access as a Barrier to Work
Lack of a car can be a barrier to employment, particularly for low-income individuals. According to a 2022 survey conducted by the South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce, almost 20 percent of individuals in that state who were able to work but were not currently working cited transportation as a barrier. Many studies have shown that ownership of a car (or a truck or motorcycle) increases the probability of work, especially among welfare recipients. And low-income individuals are the least likely to own a car and therefore must rely on other means of transportation, such as ...
Working Paper
Global Transportation Decarbonization
A number of policy proposals call for replacing fossil fuels in the name of decarbonization, but these fuels will be difficult to replace due to their as-yet unrivaled bundle of attributes: abundance, ubiquity, energy density, transportability and cost. There is a growing commitment to electrification as the dominant decarbonization pathway for transportation. While deep electrification is promising for road vehicles in wealthy countries, it will face steep obstacles. In other sectors and in the developing world, it’s not even in pole position. Global transportation decarbonization will ...
Journal Article
Equitable Transportation Tools and Publications
The following tools enable users to understand and analyze transportation trends and issues, with an emphasis on equity. The publications provide resources and strategies used in the equitable transportation field. All of these resources have been selected for their broad geographic scope or applicability
Working Paper
Diffusion of Containerization
This paper uses a newly constructed, comprehensive dataset to investigate the diffusion of containerization. The data show that country adoption is exceptionally fast while firm usage increases more slowly. To guide my empirical investigation, I build a multi-country trade model with endogenous adoption of a new transportation technology that is consistent with these facts. I then test empirically the predictions of the model and find that: (1) usage of containerization increases with firms' fixed costs and the size and average income of the container network; and (2) adoption depends on ...
Discussion Paper
Why New York City Subway Delays Don't Affect All Riders Equally
The state of the New York City subway system has worsened considerably over the past few years. As a consequence of rising ridership and decaying infrastructure, the network is plagued by delays and frequently fails to deliver New Yorkers to their destinations on time. While these delays are a headache for anyone who depends on the subway to get around, they do not affect all riders in the same way. In this post, we explain why subway delays disproportionately affect low-income New Yorkers. We show that wealthier commuters who rely on the subway are less likely to experience extensive issues ...
Discussion Paper
Intersecting Costs: Housing and Transportation in the Rural Fifth District
Our recent issue of Econ Focus covered a number of challenges facing small towns and rural areas, including the need for affordable, quality housing for low- and middle-income households. Despite typically lower housing costs in rural areas compared to urban areas, nearly four out of 10 low- and middle-income households in the rural Fifth District are housing cost burdened, meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing.Yet, access to housing is only part of the bigger story of households’ access to jobs, services, and amenities. Transportation also looms large. Housing ...
Speech
Transcript of Fireside Chat at Rutgers University—New Brunswick: November 29, 2017
Transcript of Fireside Chat at Rutgers University?New Brunswick: November 29, 2017.
Report
Missed Connections in Cleveland: The Disconnect Between Job Access and Employment
The job access rate refers to the share of jobs in a region that can be reached within a typical commute distance or time. Job access rates in Northeast Ohio have declined continuously since 2000, as employment opportunities and the population have spread farther out (Kneebone and Holmes, 2015; Pacetti, Murray, and Hartman, 2016; Fee, 2020). Declining access to jobs has made it increasingly difficult for workers to reach their workplaces via public transportation, disproportionately impacting Black and economically distressed residents (Barkley and Pereira, 2015; Brown and McShepard, 2016).
Newsletter
What is driving the differences in inflation across U.S. regions?
In this article, we explore differences in inflation dynamics across U.S. regions. Looking independently at the impact of consumption patterns and inflation by expenditure categories, we find that recent gaps across regions have existed largely because of different regional inflation rates for the housing category. Yet we also find that overall inflation is very highly correlated across regions.