Many job opportunities for young people in the big cities are forfeited because the workplace is inaccessible by public transport or because the applicant is familiar with only a small area in the city and does not go for job vacancies outside the familiar area.
An interesting piece of research(*) funded by West Midlands County Council and Birmingham Inner City Partnership shows that young people tend to concentrate their job searching to familiar districts on “known” bus routes. Familiarity with the city and the perception of travel provides more sensitive indications of likely job search patterns than conventional measures of accessibility.
A survey among job-seeking school leavers showed that three-quarters intended travelling to work by bus. The researchers found that suburban residents rely proportionately more on the car than their inner city counterparts, while the latter group make more journeys on foot. Suburban residents generally have more choice on method of travel, which, in particular, includes travel by car to job vacancies in less familiar areas.
Inner city residents, on the other hand, are almost totally dependent on buses to search less familiar parts of the city for employment. It was found that inner city residents applied for very few vacancies located anywhere on the periphery of the city despite knowledge of a bus route which could provide easy access to some of these destinations. This means that suburban residents compete for inner area job vacancies, but the reverse is not apparent, despite the availability of suburban job vacancies; inner city residents did not seriously consider “reverse commuting” by public transport for employment opportunities.
Local employment initiatives should be concentrated at locations most familiar to residents of high unemployment areas, the report concludes. Efforts should also be made to increase and improve accessibility of all parts of the city. Improvements to public transport services in conjunction with increasing levels of urban familiarity can make a positive contribution to the job search process, especially if coordinated with carefully marketed schemes to create centres of employment growth. It should be possible to improve understanding of how best to tackle the mobility and accessibility problems that are experienced by the job seeker and hence make a positive contribution to a long-standing but increasingly urgent issue.
(*) Understanding accessibility problems of the unemployed. Reported by Dr D J Quinn, a member of the Transportation and Engineering Department, West Midlands County Council in the January 1986 issue of The Planner (the journal of the Royal Town Planning Institute).
