THE JOURNEY-TO-WORK DISTANCE IN RELATION TO THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC CHARACTERISTICS OF WORKERS

The aim of this paper has been to explore the variation in the distance between the residence and work locations of industrial workers. This distance has been theoretically and empirically related to the income, number of dependents, marital status, sex, and age of workers whose job site was located in the centre of the city. A multiple regression model has shown the over-all importance of the budget constraint as a factor in the residential location decision relative to the job site. Of the variables included in the analysis, the wage rate of the worker is the strongest determinant of the location decision. Although workers who have the same budget constraint show weak locational relationships with the job site relative to the number of dependents and marital status, as suggested by the model, the only strong difference in spatial location occurs when the budget constraint is allowed to vary. Once workers have the means to increase their over-all utility level, they do trade off journey-to-work disutilities for residential facilities farther from the central city job site. But the social conditions of the worker tend to influence the residence-to-work distance only slightly when considered apart from the influence they may have on the wage rate. The over-all dependence of the journey-to-work distance on these variables in this setting hence was small, reaching an R value of only 0.38.