Bay Area Welfare-to-Work Transportation

MTC's Regional Activities

Following the passage of the federal welfare reform legislation, MTC embarked upon a number of initiatives related to the implementation of welfare reform in the Bay Area, focusing on the role of transportation in helping persons move from welfare-to-work. MTC's role has been to assist transportation providers, social service agency staff, Workforce Investment Boards, childcare advocates, community-based organizations and other stakeholders in identifying transportation-related barriers for the CalWORKs population as well as developing workable solutions to removing these barriers. Below is a summary of the various MTC-initiated welfare-to-work projects.

Regional Transportation Working Group

MTC created a staff-level working group consisting of transportation providers (transit agencies, rideshare agencies, paratransit providers) and social service agencies from each of the nine counties along with other key stakeholders as described above. This working group met regularly to review the status of welfare-to-work transportation planning at the county level, to share ideas for local implementation and to identify planning and implementation activities that may be best approached from a multi-county or regional perspective. MTC disseminated information on state and federal welfare-to-work funding opportunities related to transportation (e.g., DOL and TEA-21 Job Access and Reverse Commute grant programs) to members of the working group for use in their local planning and implementation.

Regional Welfare-to-Work Transportation Plan

In April 2000, MTC launched a regional welfare-to-work transportation plan. The regional plan was intended to identify augmentations or service changes to the transportation system to better respond to the needs of CalWORKs clients, especially for those traveling across county boundaries or transit districts, and recommend regional policy and legislative strategies for MTC and its partners to pursue to further regional welfare-to-work transportation goals..

Low-Income Flexible Transportation (LIFT) Program

In April 2000, MTC programmed $5 million in federal transportation funds over the next three years (FY 2000-2002) to fund welfare-to-work transportation projects. By programming these funds, MTC demonstrated its support of the local welfare-to-work planning efforts that were taking place in the region. The LIFT program provided up to $750,000 per project in operating and capital funds for new and expanded transportation services for low-income residents. The first cycle of LIFT funding was followed by two more funding cycles. Following the third cycle of LIFT projects, funding for transportation projects targeted to low-income residents migrated to the expanded Lifeline Transportation Program.

County CalWORKs Transportation Plans

MTC has dedicated planning funds to facilitate the development of county transportation plans for CalWORKs programs. The planning process is designed to bring together the key participants involved in implementing welfare reform in each of the counties (e.g., social service agency staff, CalWORKs participants, childcare providers, and job training and education providers) with their counterparts in transportation to identify potential transportation-related barriers to obtaining and retaining a job and develop workable options to eliminate these barriers. Plans have been completed for Alameda, Contra Costa, Napa, San Francisco and Santa Clara counties and are currently underway in San Mateo and Sonoma counties.

GIS Maps for CalWORKs Planning

To aid in the planning efforts, MTC created a series of Geographic Information System-based maps showing the home locations of welfare recipients, potential job sites, licensed child care facilities, subsidized housing sites, job training locations, major medical facilities and transit routes and bus stops in each of the counties in which plans have been developed. The purpose of this effort is to understand how well the existing transit services serve the needs of CalWORKs participants in each county. The maps proved to be useful in illustrating the accessibility of these locations to transit and the gaps in existing transit services.

Transportation Affordability

MTC’s Regional Welfare to Work Transportation Plan and the Lifeline Transportation Network Report identified the cost of transportation as a barrier preventing low-income persons from reaching essential destinations.

The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), a private operating foundation providing research support for a variety of primarily statewide public policy issues, had expressed an interest in collaborating with MTC on the subject of transportation affordability.

In Early 2002, MTC and PPIC staff held a research advisory committee meeting with key transportation and social service researchers from UC Berkeley and UCLA to discuss how best to proceed with the research, and to identify the core issues relevant to the project. The research advisory committee suggested addressing some very focused questions over the summer, that would, in turn, contribute to our general understanding of the issue of transportation affordability, and would enable us to put together a more informed work plan in the fall.

MTC and PPIC jointly hired a summer intern in 2003, who produced a reference report summarizing existing research that has been conducted on the subject, titled Transportation Affordability for Low-Income Populations, A Review of the Research Literature, Ongoing Research Projects, and San Francisco Bay Area Transportation Assistance Programs. This working paper represents an initial step in the development of a research agenda on transportation affordability for low-income populations in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is designed to be a reference document for transportation planners and researchers interested in transportation affordability and related issues for low-income people.

In June 2003, MTC entered into a contract with PPIC to conduct research on the topic of transportation affordability, based on the literature search and the feedback from the research advisory committee. The final report – entitled Transportation Spending by Low-Income California Households: Lessons for the San Francisco Bay Area – was published on July 27, 2004.

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