Econometric analysis of the link between public transport accessibility and employment

Modern transport policy analysis has ceased to be mainly about transport impacts and is now focussed on the effects of provision and policy upon the operation of the economy and society. For people on the edge of the labour market, many of whom do not have access to other forms of transport, public transport is a very important source of accessibility to jobs. This analysis addresses what we see as a key research gap in Britain - whether there is a systematic variation in the level of employment at the local level with the quality of the public transport network. To address this we apply regression analysis to explain employment as a function of accessibility and other local labour and socioeconomic variables. Our data were based on a cross-section of output areas from the English part of the 2011 Census. We found a statistically significant relationship suggesting that, all else being equal, areas with shorter public transport times were associated with higher employment levels.