Job access inequity, which serves as a key indicator for social injustice, has been traditionally illustrated by spatial mismatch and spatial job accessibility. Job access is usually measured by either car-based accessibility or transit-based accessibility for the entire workforce. However, few studies have exclusively concentrated on the job access inequity faced by transit-based workers, who make up a significant proportion of the commuters in major metro areas. Besides, existing studies on spatial mismatch and spatial job accessibility have been inadequate in terms of revealing the true degree of job access inequity as they have failed to integrate key economic components including transport cost and income. Moreover, existing literature has measured job access distribution inequity by mostly relying upon the Gini coefficient, which mainly reveals the overall degree of inequity across the entire population but falls short of unveiling distributive inequity between the rich and the poor. Thus, an alternative measure that can capture the job access inequity distribution between the rich and poor is needed.
This dissertation, by focusing on transit-based workers, seeks to, on the one hand, improve measures for spatial mismatch and spatial job accessibility by integrating key economic components; on the other hand, proposes a new approach that employs a wealth inequality index called the Palma ratio for measuring the distribution inequity of transit-based job accessibility between the richest and poorest population. The results from this dissertation can help improve the accuracy of job access inequity and serve as key reference materials for policymakers regarding the improvement of transit-based job accessibility.
