01340263

Component

The market share of urban transit agencies has been bolstered by the fact that immigrants comprise a large share of urban population growth, and they are much less likely to rely on automobiles than the US-born. But this trend is uncertain because immigrants rapidly increase their auto ownership and use, and relatively little is known how current and future cohorts of immigrants differ from previous ones. Understanding the causes of the mode choice of immigrants is therefore of particular interest to transportation planners. In this paper the authors focus on the spatial characteristics of immigrant home and workplace regions, and upon the occupations held by immigrants, to investigate whether these provide alternative explanations for mode choices. Previous research in this area has done relatively little on the spatial front and virtually nothing on the occupational question. With disaggregate individual-level New Jersey data from the 2006 to 2008 American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample, the authors were able to distinguish determinants of rail and bus use from the determinants of auto use for immigrants and US-born using a standard multinomial logit regression model. The authors found that both bus and rail use are highly correlated with workplace and home region characteristics such as transit accessibility, employment density, and population density, as well as with occupation. Immigrant status in the choice of whether to commute via rail appears to be relatively unimportant when controlling for these observable factors—a novel finding in this literature. Occupational trends, the industrial composition of economic growth, and the spatial location of jobs and homes may have important roles to play in determining the impacts of immigration-fueled urban growth, and therefore the environmental impacts of future urbanization.

01329018

11-1651

English

36p

2011

Transportation Research Board 90th Annual Meeting

DVD

Figures; Photos; References; Tables (4)

Accessibility; Automobile ownership; Bus transportation; Commuters; Immigrants; Mode choice; Occupations; Public transit; Rail transit; Transit riders; Work trips

New Jersey

Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2011 Paper #11-1651

TRIS, TRB

Feb 17 2011 5:53PM