Residential and Job Mobility

How Does the Flexibility Afforded by Automobiles Reduce Residential Mobility and Uncrease Job Mobility?

As far as significant socioeconomic status differentials are concerned, Reeder's (1956) study revealed that respondents in the upper socioeconomic status occupations tended to spend less time traveling between their home and place of work than those in lower socioeconomic status occupational categories. Reeder (1956) concludes that widespread ownership of the automobile and its use as the major vehicle of transportation in the journey to work render greater flexibility to the breadwinner with regard to location of residence in terms of workplace. Furthermore, this flexibility may reduce residential mobility and increase job mobility. In addition, none of the socioeconomic variables showed statistically significant differences with respect to the cost of the journey to work. Income and occupation, however, yielded statistically significant differences with respect to mode of travel and time involved in the journey to work, respectively (Reeder, 1956).

Concerning the flexibility of the automobile and the amount of job mobility provided by Los Angeles public transit, Amy Ford says that "I can say only from my own experiences that we see many poor Latino people travel on the bus to Beverly Hills, where we assume they are working as domestic or landscape laborers. So, people are able to use the bus to get to their jobs, but is this truly social mobility? If social mobility is a movement in income or social class, we don't think transit does a whole lot to help that. I'm sure, though, there are stories of people who ride the bus to get to school, and maybe an argument for social mobility can be made this way. I'm not proposing an anti-transit argument, by the way, just saying that if people expect transit to solve our problems of division of classes and disparities in wealth, we think they're going to wait a long time."