ABSTRACT
The increasing dominance of the automobile in the post-war period has been
accompanied by a decentralization of the metropolis and the slow deconcentra-
tion of the population. While this pattern is most advanced in the most
automobile-dependent, suburban nations – particularly the United States (US) –
it is nonetheless a global trend (Beauregard 1993, 2006). The decentralizing
auto-mobile city has transformed traditional logics of workplace and residential
location, but also the whole process and experience of commuting. The factors
shaping metropolitan commuting patterns have important implications for policy
makers grappling with how best to deal with increasing congestion and auto-
mobile use given their negative effects on the environment, people’s health, and
inequality (Ewing et al. 2008). Kain (1968) was among the first to articulate some of the problems with the
kind of decentralization that was already occurring in the US by the 1960s, and
that would in subsequent decades turn many older metropolitan areas effectively
inside-out. Whereas low-income and low-skilled workers, particularly blacks,
were confined and concentrated in the old inner cities, the kinds of work that had
been employing these workers was rapidly moving out to the urban fringes
where public transit was infrequent or non-existent, while older factories in the
inner cities were closing. Such a “spatial mismatch” in the locations of low-skill
workplaces and workers would continue to deepen, and by the 1990s was an
entrenched characteristic of the geography of poverty, inequality, and race in the
US (Holzer 1991, 1996; Ihlanfeldt and Sjoquist 1998; Ihlanfeldt 1999; Preston
and McLafferty 1999; Taylor and Ong 1995; Martin 2004). Those living in the
inner cities often did not learn about employment opportunities in the suburbs,
and if they did not drive, often they could not get there. Then, even if they were
lucky enough to be called to a job interview and could drive to it, they often
found that white employers were more likely to hire local white applicants
(Ihlanfeldt and Sjoquist 1998). The decentralizing city was now producing new
forms of inequality, expressed through mobility, and resulting from unequal
access to different forms of mobility.
