Read on Twitter
**New working paper** “Understanding Socioeconomic Disparities in Travel Behavior during the COVID-19 Pandemic” We use data from the Seattle area to document the income gap in travel during shutdown and how commuting drives this gap. (1/n)
This is joint work of Matt Freedman (UC-Irvine), Becca Brough (colleage from @LEOatND ), and me with big assists from @kcmetrobus and @SafeGraph. Link to the paper: https://www.economics.uci.edu/research/wp/1920/19-20-07.pdf (2/n)
Other work shows that people with low income and people of color bear the brunt of both the pandemic itself and the economic side-effects from social distancing. We argue that these two inequities are linked because these groups still have to commute. (3/n)
On to what we find. The socioeconomic gap is definitely there. Overall travel (from phone geotracking) and transit boardings fall much more in high education neighborhoods. (4/n)
The gap operates at the individual, rather than neighborhood level. Metro runs a low-income fare program. For nearly every route, low-income fare ridership fell less than for the full fare. This isn’t about supply of transit. (5/n)
Commuting to work looks like the main reason. The weekday-weekend cycle in travel basically disappears for high-education neighborhoods, not for low-education. Travel during commute hours is similarly more responsive for high education places and high income people. (6/n)
Finally, we happened to be asking low-income people about their travel intentions for a different project. Intention to travel for shopping, recreation, etc. falls off after Covid. Intention to travel for work does not. (n/n)
