The responsibility for developing transportation programs for welfare participants spans multiple public agencies. Consequently, federal funding programs require that agencies work together to develop a coordinated response to addressing the transportation needs of welfare participants. Based on a survey of transportation, welfare and employment agencies in 19 California counties, this study examines the potential institutional obstacles to successful local collaboration and coordination among public agencies. The research shows that new sources of federal funds have encouraged interagency efforts to address the transportation needs of welfare participants. However, the divergent organizational goals, methods, and approaches of the participating agencies heavily influence these collaborative efforts. As a consequence, stakeholders may have difficulty moving beyond the narrow interests of their individual institutions to identify and plan for the transportation needs of welfare participants.

As a result of the recent restructuring of the U.S. welfare system, millions of welfare recipients have entered the paid labor market. In response, public agencies have established programs to transition recipients into the labor market or else risk dramatic increases in poverty. While access to transportation affects welfare recipients’ ability to find and retain employment, relatively little is known about the relationship between transportation and welfare usage, particularly among ethnic and racial subgroups of the population.

This study relies on survey data from two California counties, Los Angeles and Fresno to examine the travel patterns and barriers of welfare recipients across racial and ethnic groups, focusing specifically on the transportation issues facing Southeast Asians. The findings show that Southeast Asian welfare recipients are more—not less—reliant on automobiles for their travel than other racial and ethnic groups. While this finding might suggest that low-income Southeast Asian families do not face transportation difficulties, evidence from the surveys show otherwise. Some Southeast Asian households do not have automobiles. Moreover, Southeast Asian respondents reported the greatest difficulty with their travel largely because they face numerous auto-related transportation problems, the most apparent is the age of their vehicles. Two-thirds of auto-owning Southeast Asian respondents owned vehicles that were over ten years old and 61 percent had trouble maintaining their vehicles.

The findings of this study suggest that policies to facilitate the economic incorporation of low-income families—including Southeast Asian households—must include efforts to facilitate access to automobiles and, in particular, access to reliable vehicles. For Southeast Asian recipients living in dense urban areas, transit agencies must devote greater attention to providing language assistance to those with limited English language proficiency. Finally, additional data are needed to better understand the travel patterns and barriers of Southeast Asians and to evaluate existing programs to meet their transportation needs.

Welfare-to-work transportation programs are premised on a conceptualization of the spatial mismatch hypothesis that focuses on the mismatch between the central city locations of welfare participants, rapidly expanding job opportunities in the suburbs, and the long commutes needed to connect them. Feminist scholarship and travel behavior research, however, show that low-income, single mothers have travel patterns that are not consistent with a mismatch between central city residents commuting considerable distances to suburban jobs. Premising welfare-to-work transportation policies on the spatial mismatch hypothesis has thus resulted in a policy mismatch between welfare recipients and their transportation needs. To better address the transportation needs of low-income mothers, policies must account for the important role of gender in determining where welfare recipients will look for work, how they are likely to conduct their job searches, and the mode by which they travel to both employment and household-supporting destinations.

Despite the size and growth of the immigrant population in the U.S., only a handful of scholars have studied the travel behavior of immigrants and its impact on our nation’s roads, highways, and transit systems. Yet immigration has affected and will continue to affect our transportation infrastructure significantly. In particular, the data suggest that immigration has contributed to increased travel across all transportation modes, the growth in transit commuters, and a shift in the demographic composition of transit riders. These trends have implications for congestion, the future of transit ridership, and opportunities to better address the travel needs of immigrants.