Transportation Spending by Low-Income California Households ...

understate the actual public transit cost associated with a specific
commute. Therefore, our results should be seen as illustrative examples
of the range of potential commute costs that may be associated with the
transportation options available in the Bay Area. The main purpose of
this analysis is to identify factors that contribute to particularly high
commute costs in the Bay Area overall, not to provide exact estimates of
commute costs for each county.
Within-County Commutes
Within each county, the smaller circles on the maps in Figures 4.3
and 4.4 represent the two neighborhoods with the highest number of
low-income individuals, and the larger circles represent the centroid of
the city with the highest number of jobs. The transit operators serving
the selected low-income neighborhoods for the within-county example
commutes are shown in Table 4.3. All of the transit routes identified for
the intracounty example commutes were bus routes, with the exception
of one route in Contra Costa County, which requires a transfer from bus
to BART to get to Concord. The “Annual Cost” column of Table 4.3
shows the public transit costs for the intracounty commutes that were
calculated for the two selected low-income neighborhoods in each
county.
The average annual cost across the 18 example commutes was $867,
but there is a great deal of variation. Annual public transit costs for
within-county commutes range from $500 for some commutes in Solano
and Sonoma Counties to $1,325 in Contra Costa County. The
relatively expensive public transit commutes in Santa Clara, San Mateo,
and Contra Costa potentially affect a large number of low-income
households in the Bay Area, because over 40 percent of the Bay Area’s
low-income households live in one of these three counties. Alameda
County, the county with the highest number of low-income workers, has
a relatively moderate public transit cost ranging from $750 to $875 per
year. These estimated costs match fairly closely with results from a
survey of CalWORKs recipients in Alameda County, which reports that
the average amount spent on travel to work or job training by
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