The jobs are out in the suburbs. The workers live in the city. The bus often can’t connect the two.
So says a new report. Its conclusion: The region needs to fix the transit system — from biking to buses to ride-sharing — in order to break the cycle of chronic, long-term unemployment.
The Greater New Haven Job Access and Transportation Working Group and DataHaven released the report Friday at the Greater New Haven NAACP headquarters on Whalley Avenue.
The report identifies lack of access to reliable and timely transportation as a leading cause of chronic and long term unemployment. This latest report is a follow up to an Urban Apartheid report the Greater New Haven NACCP published three years ago.
While New Haven bus riders have “better” bus access and transfer points than residents in neighboring cities to help get them to work in more affluent neighborhoods, it is just barely better, according to the report.
Click here to read the report.
The problem? A phenomenon called “job sprawl” puts most of the entry- and mid-level jobs in more affluent suburbs where housing is expensive and public transportation is scarce. In many cases accessing those jobs takes 90 minutes by bus and even longer on nights and weekends.
New Haven residents are able to get to just 44 percent of all of the available entry- and mid-level jobs that are now located outside of the city, according to the report, but their lack of access to a private car, or more importantly, a transit system that reliably gets them to work, particularly on nights and weekends, limits their employment opportunities.
Report author Mark Abraham (pictured), executive director of DataHaven, said that in New Haven, some communities are impacted more than others. He said neighborhoods like Dixwell, Dwight, the Hill and West Rock, where nearly half of the households have no cars, have seen people go from having jobs in the city in the 1980s and 1990s, to a dramatic increase of people working outside of the city in the last decade.
“There has been a shift in the geography of work,” Abraham said. ” “The timing of this local report is important because other national studies have now scientifically confirmed that job access is related to transportation particularly in urban communities.”
Greater New Haven NAACP President Dori Dumas (second from right in photo) said timing is also important because of the increasing recognition of transportation as a critical component of economic development and opportunity. She pointed to the city’s focus on transforming transportation inside New Haven and Gov. Dannel Malloy’s focus on transportation and capital improvements for all of Connecticut during his recent State of the State address.
Dumas said the report had been in the works for some time, but the goal is to leverage this heightened focus on transportation with the data that New Haven has in its hands with this report.
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Doug Hausladen, the city’s director of transportation and parking (at left in photo with with Anthony Dawson of the NAACP and the Board of Police Commissioners), said the Harp administration has embarked on a year-long study that it hopes will result in the total transformation of transit in the city. He said the transformation that the city is looking for is not just about cars, but about integrating public transit, biking and walking. “We are asking too much of people,” he said of the current transit system.
State transportation Commissioner James Redeker told the Independent that New Haven has “wonderful” and “convenient” bus service. (See video. Local CT Transit officials recently promised some improvements are on the way.
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