Transportation Spending by Low-Income California Households ...

1. Introduction
Costs associated with transportation can strain the already tight
budgets of low-income families. To the extent that transportation costs
limit the mobility of low-income households, they may also reduce
access to jobs and to other destinations such as health care facilities,
grocery stores, and social service agencies. Diminished access to job
opportunities can lead to negative consequences in the labor
market—lower employment rates and lower earnings—thereby placing
even more pressure on household budgets. If transportation is
unaffordable, the potential consequences for low-income households
are serious. So the question arises: Is transportation affordable for lowincome
households, and if not, what can we do about it?
Unfortunately, measuring transportation affordability is not as
easy as it may seem. Affordability depends not only on the cost of
transportation but also on household income, savings, ability to
borrow, the costs of other necessities, the quality of transportation
services provided at a given price, and the ability of households to
choose a residential location that is convenient to work and other
frequent destinations. 1 Given these complexities, this report focuses
on the more modest goal of understanding the monetary costs
of transportation and how they interrelate with time costs and
mobility.
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1The following passage from Quigley and Raphael’s recent article on housing
affordability also applies well to transportation affordability: “the rhetoric of
‘affordability’ . . . jumbles together in a single term a number of disparate issues: the
distribution of housing prices, the distribution of housing quality, the distribution of
income, the ability of households to borrow, public policies affecting housing markets,
conditions affecting the supply of new or refurbished housing, and the choices that
people make about how much housing to consume relative to other goods. This mixture
of issues raises difficulties in interpreting even basic facts about housing affordability”
(Quigley and Raphael, 2004, p. 191).
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