Should My Car Move or Should I? A Model of Residential and Commuting Choices

Abstract

Policymakers have been slow to implement price-based congestion policies due in part to how little is known about the effects of policies that influence more than simply an individual's commuting method. An individual can also alter her commute by choosing to travel from a different location. I develop a discrete choice structural model of the joint decisions of family residence and individual commuting modes, given the characteristics of the housing market and commuting options. I use rich individual-level data that allow me to include numerous unobserved heterogeneity terms; this strengthens the validity of my results relative to more aggregate analyses that are often undertaken. I am in the process of using model estimates to simulate the full set of effects of transportation policies that alter the financial and time costs of commuting. These policies include congestion pricing schemes, fuel or carbon taxes, and increased parking fees.

Interactions of Public Paratransit and Vocational Rehabilitation

“…We know of no reason to expect people without day-to-day transportation to be more mobile in their residential choices, and better job prospects are likely to be found in urban areas, where we would expect to …nd better, not worse, paratransit systems. 3 9 While it is feasible to obtain reasonable measures of this time cost by modeling the transportation network (see Clapp, 2017), the lack of information on the home (and job) locations of individuals in our data (due to con…dentiality reasons) prevents the use of this type of more detailed measure. Goodwill and Joslin (2013) update two-decade-old forecasts of paratransit demand frequently used by paratransit providers to make service decisions.…”

“…Alternatively, researchers could geocode the home and work locations of VR clients (subject to appropriate con…dentiality protocols). Researchers could then use this geographic information to determine the public commuting options available and their associated costs (Clapp, 2017).…”

“…An even simpler approach, aggregating over services, is to simulate the generalized residuals for equations (3) and (5) 13 and then compute the correlation of the generalized residuals and each public transportation variable of interest. If the generalized residuals for a particular labor market outcome are correlated with a speci…c measure of transportation quality, then the variation in transportation quality helps "explain" some of the variation in labor market for large n. Figure 1 shows how the test statistic varies for three relatively small values of b k n as n gets large.…”