This paper examines the access that neighborhoods have to jobs via public transit, if it varies by race/ethnicity, and what difference it makes in terms of socioeconomic outcomes. Decades of research has argued that important sites of employment are often not located in or are inaccessible to racial/ethnic minority neighborhoods. Here, we examine this proposition and take into account how public transit may play into this process. On the one hand, public transit as a public good may have the power to overcome the liabilities of place. If we can build transportation systems that give all neighborhoods comparable access to jobs, part of the spatial mismatch problem may be corrected. On the other hand, if public transit is built in such a way that certain racial/ethnic groups are benefiting, but not others, access alone is not enough to achieve parity. Using the 2013–2017 American Community Survey and the 2017 Access Across America Transit study, we examine how neighborhood racial/ethnic composition is related to job accessibility and socioeconomic outcomes at the block group level for 49 of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. We find that Black and Latino neighborhoods have access to fewer jobs via public transit, and that they also have lower median household income and a higher unemployment rate, net of access to jobs. Access to more jobs via mass transit is related to higher incomes in White block group clusters, but has no impact on household incomes in Black and Latino clusters. This suggests that public transit as implemented serves to aggravate existing inequalities and is not currently acting as a policy tool to ameliorate inequality.

本文研究了社区通过公共交通获得工作的机会（是否因种族/民族而异），以及它对社会经济成果有何影响。数十年的研究表明，重要的就业地点往往不在少数种族/族裔社区内或无法进入。在这里，我们研究了这个命题，并考虑了公共交通如何参与这个过程。一方面，公共交通作为一种公共产品可能有能力克服地方的负债。如果我们能够建立为所有社区提供同等就业机会的交通系统，那么部分空间不匹配问题可能会得到纠正。另一方面，如果公共交通的建设方式使某些种族/族裔群体受益，而不是其他群体，那么仅靠交通不足以实现平等。利用 2013-2017 年美国社区调查和 2017 年全美交通研究，我们研究了美国 50 个最大都市区中的 49 个街区群体层面的社区种族/族裔构成与就业机会和社会经济成果的关系。我们发现，黑人和拉丁裔社区通过公共交通获得的就业机会较少，而且扣除就业机会后，他们的家庭收入中位数也较低，失业率较高。通过公共交通获得更多工作与白人街区群体的收入增加有关，但对黑人和拉丁裔群体的家庭收入没有影响。这表明，实施的公共交通会加剧现有的不平等，目前并不能作为改善不平等的政策工具。