There are many transportation and child care barriers facing low-income individuals. These barriers limit employment opportunities and impede long-term job retention. In order to ensure the economic success of individuals and businesses in the region, child care and transportation barriers must be resolved. DVCCC’s Child Care and Transportation Project intends to address these barriers by creating resources that will provide direction for those experiencing difficulty travelling to employment and child care centers, and by performing spatial analyses that will, in the long-term, inform policy and planning around transportation, employment and child care issues.

Transportation needs have changed as jobs have moved from the city to the outlying suburbs. Three out of four welfare recipients live in central cities or rural areas while two-thirds of all new jobs, especially entry-level manufacturing, warehouse and service jobs, are in the suburbs. Low-income households typically lack reliable automobiles for commuting, leaving them to rely on public transportation to get to child care, work and supportive services. Transit routes often do not reach major suburban employment centers.

In the Philadelphia region, welfare reform will directly affect thousands of people. In late 1998, approximately 85,000 families in the region were receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Although some welfare recipients have been temporarily exempted from job search requirements (due to age, disabilities, or lack of available child care), almost 57,000 individuals in Philadelphia have been forced to find jobs or lose their major means of support with the implementation of welfare reform. While there are some jobs available, the commute times from the city to the suburbs--for example, from North and Northeast Philadelphia to major employment centers in the suburbs--are estimated to take anywhere from sixty to eighty-five minutes each way. This does not include any additional time needed to transport children to child care, the scarcity of which may require taking children to out-of-the-way facilities. Unfortunately, even the Department of Public Welfare admits that, despite allocating additional resources to child care programs, the waiting list for child care centers will not be eliminated with the advent of welfare reform. In July of 1997, there were 3,433 children from the five-county region waiting for openings at child care facilities; in November 1998, there were 4,902 children in the region on the waiting list.

Access to child care affects an individual’s chances for succeeding in the job market. Studies have indicated that there is a direct correlation between access to reliable child care and job retention. In Illinois during a one-year period, 20% of women who worked returned to AFDC due to child care problems; many were forced to quit their jobs because reliable, quality child care was not available to them. Almost four in ten AFDC clients receiving child care assistance say that child care problems are a barrier to employment. Without access to quality child care, parents will continue to struggle to obtain and keep the job that could bring them economic security, and companies will continue to struggle to acquire and retain the skilled employees that will bring them workforce stability.

Under the requirements of federal welfare legislation, the number of recipients required to work is increasing. This results in an increased caseload for state employment centers and a need for even greater efficiency and placement success rates. Due to employment centers’ increased caseload on such short notice, and the brief time period in which clients must be placed, many employment centers have limited time and resources available to improve upon the current job search and placement process. Often, the result is that clients are placed in jobs that are hours away from their homes and have limited public transit access.

The following components of the project (maps, analysis, and information resources) aim to address transportation and child care barriers in the most practical, expedient way possible. The project will make use of various kinds of resources and tools in order to disseminate information, link previously disconnected resources, and perform spatial analyses.

The Child Care and Transportation Project will provide a much-needed resource for individuals who must plan daily commutes to employment and child care centers. This resource could be expanded upon by developing an internet-based, user-friendly mapping system that would allow job-seekers, employers and case managers to add a spatial component to the job placement process. The system would be designed for use by job developers, employment counselors, and training specialists, or anyone else who helps people look for work. It would include comprehensive information about job openings, child care facilities, and transportation services. This system would add value to the current job placement process by adding a spatial component that links transportation, child care and employment issues.

Location can have a significant impact on job placement and retention; accounting for locational factors before making placement decisions could increase placement success rates. By adding a spatial component to the job search process, placements made using the mapping system would allow for greater access to jobs--either by placing people in jobs closer to their homes, or by placing people in jobs that fall along public transit routes. For people that cannot find jobs near their homes or near public transit lines, the system could provide information about alternative transportation services. Use of the system would at least ensure that the most easily accessible job openings are explored before any other employment options; this decreases the transportation barrier at the beginning of the job search process.

The proposed mapping system would make job developers’ work easier not only by adding location to the job search process, but also by providing a centralized database of information. In developing the project’s map products, a significant amount of information will be compiled and organized. This database will be designed to accommodate additional information, such as the locations of job training programs, health care facilities, retail centers and recreational sites. This additional spatial information could be added to enhance the value of the mapping system. The completed mapping system would be easy to use and maintain, inexpensive to operate, and would improve job placement efficiency and effectiveness.

Ultimately, DVCCC would like to coordinate the development of a comprehensive regional database, linked to a user-friendly web page, that would allow anyone accessing the site to produce customized maps. This would be a tremendously valuable resource in the welfare-to-work process—employment centers would have the means to show the geographic relationship between clients, jobs, transit, and child care. An accessible mapping system would benefit other users as well, such as social workers, individual job seekers, researchers and policy analysts. DVCCC project staff are currently investigating models for such a mapping service, and are developing relationships with potential partners.