Abstract:
The major features of welfare reform affecting travel demand are job training and work requirements and the five year life time cap on benefits, which combine to cause an increase in work and school trips. A binary logit model fitted to data collected from rural and small town commuters in Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas, suggests a small but non-zero proportion of rural residents affected by welfare reform legislation will require public transportation to fulfill their work and training obligations. Factors found to influence mode choice in this population include service quality and cost, numbers of licensed drivers in a household, and age of commuter. More data on rural commuter households is needed before an operational forecasting procedure can be deployed.
