Search Results
Report
Providing Labor Market Context for Debt-Related Driver’s License Suspensions in Ohio
More than 60 percent of Ohio’s driver’s license suspensions do not stem from bad driving; instead, they arise because the driver owes an unpaid debt. Debt-related suspensions (DRS) could prevent people from getting to work where they could make the money needed to repay the debt. In this report, we investigate whether DRS has implications for Ohio’s labor force.
Journal Article
Practitioner Perspectives: Workforce Development Challenges and Opportunities in the Eighth District
Roundtables with labor force development stakeholders across the Eighth District identified housing, transportation and child care as key barriers to work.
Speech
Keynote Address
Addressing the Equitable Transit Summit in Scranton, PA, on October 17, Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker discussed how access to transportation is a building block for economic well-being.
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 ...
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.
Briefing
Getting to Work in New England: Commuting Patterns across the Region
Commuting is nearly ubiquitous across New England. Employers in cities and towns large and small depend on workers who commute from communities near and far. Communities, in turn, rely on employers located in cities and towns scattered in every direction to provide jobs for their residents. Workers may choose to live in a city other than where they work for a host of reasons, including housing and transportation options, school preferences, and work locations of a partner or spouse. This Regional Brief analyzes data on current commuting patterns, using 2022 New England data primarily. While ...
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
Transportation and Commuting Patterns: A View from the Fifth District
The transportation system is a key component of the economic performance of regions. An important role of the urban transportation system is to facilitate commuting between homes and jobs. At the national level, in 2017 commutes represented on average about a quarter of all annual vehicle trips per household. (The shares of trips that were shopping trips, recreational and social trips, and other trips for personal and family reasons were all about the same.) Economists have more data on commuters and their commutes than is commonly realized ? and it's relevant to many economic questions.
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 ...
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).