Private Transport Creates Spatial Limits to Mobility

How Does Private Transport Create Spatial Limits to Mobility?

Among those with access to urban transportation, inequities appear in time spent in work-related travel. Although shifts in transportation technology towards private transportation and policies supporting that trend promised the universal destruction of the barriers of space through decreased travel time, they created instead land-use patterns that imposed new spatial limits to mobility. Average time required to travel to work has remained about the same since World War II in spite of faster cars.

In urban centers more dependent upon the automobile than upon public transportation, the average travel time to work has increased (Voorhees & Bellomo, 1970, 121-35; Guest 1975, 220-25) and will probably increase 10-15% by the end of the century (OTA, 1979, 26; cited in Yago, 1983). Moreover, work trip length varies with an individual's position in the social structure: minority and blue-collar workers travel farther and longer to work than the average worker, regardless of residential location (Greytak, 1970; Feldman, 1977; cited in Yago, 1983).