By now measures of employment "access" and "potential" have been widely diffused in the literature on regional economics and transport planning. Pooler (1995) gives a brief review of accessibility measures, indicating that these concepts date back to the 1930s. According to standard economic intuition, the employment access of a residential area increases with its proximity to concentrations of employment opportunities. The various indices of accessibility which have been proposed merely formalize and quantify this notion.

Studies of the “stated preferences” of households generally report public and political opposition by urban commuters to congestion pricing. It is thought that this opposition inhibits or precludes tolls and pricing systems that would enhance efficiency in the use of scarce roadways. This paper analyzes the only case in which road pricing was decided by a citizen referendum on the basis of experience with a specific pricing system. The city of Stockholm introduced a toll system for seven months in 2006, after which citizens voted on its permanent adoption. We match precinct voting records to citizen commute times and costs by traffic zone, and we analyze patterns of voting in response to economic and political incentives. We document political and ideological incentives for citizen choice, but we also find that the pattern of time savings and incremental costs exerts a powerful influence on voting behavior. In this instance, at least, citizen voters behave as if they value commute time highly. When they have experienced first-hand the out-of-pocket costs and time-savings of a specific pricing scheme, they are prepared to adopt freely policies which reduce congestion on urban motorways.

This paper compares the level of spatial segregation by race or ethnicity with the level of spatial segregation by demographic group in two metropolitan areas with similar incomes and demographic compositions, but with very different racial proportions. We compare census tract data for the San Francisco Bay Area for 1980, a region with six large ethnic divisions, with similar data for the Stockholm metropolitan area, a region with a much more homogeneous racial composition.

An extensive comparison of entropy measures of segregation in the two regions is presented, including for Stockholm, an analysis of spatial segregation by income class. One important finding of the analysis, replicated in two very different metropolitan regions, is that spatial segregation by race or ethnicity is unrelated to the principal economic factors which presumable underly spatial segregation by income clss or demographic grouping.

Studies of the “stated preferences” of households generally report public and political opposition by urban commuters to congestion pricing. It is thought that this opposition inhibits or precludes tolls and pricing systems that would enhance efficiency in the use of scarce roadways. This paper analyzes the only case in which road pricing was decided by a citizen referendum on the basis of experience with a specific pricing system. The city of Stockholm introduced a toll system for 7 months in 2006, after which citizens voted on its permanent adoption. We match precinct voting records to resident commute times and costs by traffic zone, and we analyze patterns of voting in response to economic and political incentives. We document political and ideological incentives for citizen choice, but we also find that the pattern of time savings and incremental costs exerts a powerful influence on voting behavior.

In this instance, at least, citizen voters behave as if they value commute time highly. When they have experienced first-hand the out-of-pocket costs and time-savings of a specific pricing scheme, they are prepared to adopt freely policies that reduce congestion on urban motorways.

Most analyses of urban transportation and residential location ignore the effects of labor force experience or individual skills upon the location of the worksite; they also ignore the potential effect of these factors upon the tradeoff between housing and community costs.

This paper, in contrast, analyzes the spatial distribution of worksites by industry, occupation, and educational requirements within a large metropolitan area. In a parallel fashion, we investigate the spatial distribution of the residential sites of workers, differentiated in a similar manner.

We use this spatially disaggregated information to analyze regularities in commuting and transport behavior. We also develop alternative measures of regional homogeneity, more descriptive alternatives to ratios of jobs to income and similar summary statistics measuring regional "balance."