An examination of the jobs-housing balance of different categories of workers across 26 metropolitan regions

- Commuting measures calculated for 26 U.S. metros disaggregated by age, income, and industry.
- Generally jobs-housing balance better for younger and lower income workers.
- Columbus the only metro to lower observed commute distances between 2003 and 2013.

The urban form has been examined through jobs-housing balance and excess commuting studies for over 30 years. Many of these studies have found new and useful ways to investigate “travel to work” not only across time and space, but also across different subsets of commuters. This paper examines 26 metro regions in the U.S. that were previously measured in 2002 to see how commuting travel has changed between 1990 and 2003 and from 2003 to 2013. In this manuscript the excess commuting framework, disaggregated across a number of categories of commuters, is applied using data readily available from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) database. These disaggregations illuminate interesting trends in the jobs-housing balance and resulting commuting patterns of different kinds of workers across U.S. metro regions. Results show that commutes are generally increasing although Columbus, OH is the notable exception. Additionally, some of the commuting measures are better suited for longitudinal analyses of a single metro region and others more suited to comparisons across metro regions.