California's Immigrant Commuters: "on the bus" for now—but not for long

Findings by researchers at ITS Los Angeles, Davis, and Berkeley show that transit agencies will face challenges as their largest source of riders assimilates.

As California's demographics change, so do California's travel patterns. The biggest demographic change—the growth of the foreign-born population from 1980 to 2000—will have a significant effect on the state's transportation system; among the hardest hit will be public transit. That is one of the key findings of a two-year research project carried out by teams at ITS Los Angeles, Davis, and Berkeley for the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans).

Today, 26 percent of California's residents were born outside the U.S. While they rely heavily on cars, just like their native-born counterparts, they use transit more than twice as often, 8.4 percent of their commute trips are by transit, versus 4.1 percent for native-born commuters.

Put another way, without the new immigrant riders, transit ridership would be much smaller. Since the 1980s, the population of the state has risen 43 percent, while the number of foreign-born residents has risen more than three times as much, up 148 percent. Nearly half the people who ride transit to work in California are foreign-born.

But, the ITS researchers note, if there is no change in current policies, these new transit riders are likely to disappear from the ridership rolls, as they leave transit for cars. The questions researchers are seeking to answer is: how soon? and why?

Nearly half the people who ride transit to work in California are foreign-born. Researchers are hoping to answer key questions, like, How soon will they switch to cars? What can be done to retain them as transit riders?

A better understanding of the forces that compel their shift away from transit could help policymakers design systems that would retain this new cohort of riders and, ideally, attract more native-born commuters, too.

"...[T]ransit agencies must either find ways to retain immigrant riders or fill the ridership gap with other transit markets. Both of these strategies will be difficult considering mode share trends consistently demonstrate that almost every population group—including immigrants—is relying more on automobiles and less on fixed-route transit," writes Evelyn Blumenberg, Associate Professor at ITS Los Angeles, and her co-author Alexandra Elizabeth Evans in their paper, "Transportation Assimilation: Immigrants, Race and Ethnicity, and Mode Choice," for the 2007 annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board.

Blumenberg and Evans analyzed commute data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Census, the most reliable data to date on immigrants and their travel. Supplementing the data analysis at ITS Los Angeles, researchers at ITS-Davis and Berkeley conducted focus groups with Mexican immigrants, who, at 44 percent of the state's immigrant population, are the single largest component of the state's foreign-born residents. The Davis and Berkeley researchers have also conducted interviews with community-based organizations that work with immigrants.

Blumenberg identified a number of factors that could cause transit systems to lose their foreign-born commuters, including the following:

• immigration rates are forecast to slow over the next few decades so there will be fewer new immigrants to replenish the ridership pool; from 1990 to 2000, immigration began to slow, with California's foreign-born population increasing a mere 1.5 percent, and a 2005 study predicts that the number will remain steady;
• new immigrants tend to be more automobile-reliant than their counterparts in earlier years due to increases in car ownership around the globe, and other factors; and,
• as immigrants assimilate and their economic status rises, they tend to purchase and use cars, which are an important tool to economic betterment by supplying access to jobs, education and health care.

(The researchers note that their study has a number of limitations, due to the lack of precision of census data and the fact that only commute trips are identified. For additional details about these issues, please refer to the papers cited in the sidebar.)

Improvements in transit service—increased frequency, shorter headways, safer and more attractive bus stops and stations, and more flexible services—could entice foreign-born riders not to give up their transit habit and could help lure native-born riders as well. In 1980, native-born residents made up 30 percent of transit commuters; that number is now down to 11 percent.

The appeal of cars

Like the population at large, most immigrants—87 percent—commute by car. What's different, however, is that nearly a quarter of them, 21 percent, drive to work in a carpool, nearly double the carpooling rate of native-born commuters. And carpooling among Asian and Hispanic immigrants remains popular even among those who have spent many years in the U.S. Blumenberg and her team are continuing to study this trend.

In their study of Mexican immigrants, the ITS-Davis and Berkeley researchers found that travel by car is so valued that households with cars make numerous informal sharing arrangements to "stretch" access to the vehicle. The interviews also showed that the inability to acquire a driver's license and the lack of access to safe places to learn to drive are serious barriers to safe and legal driving. The costs of maintenance and gas for a private vehicle can be prohibitive. Nevertheless, the respondents, albeit a small sample size, overwhelmingly cited car access as a critical necessity.

Immigrants as a group are by no means monolithic. In addition to differences by race, ethnicity and year of arrival, gender and age also play roles in transportation behavior. The statistical models show that Hispanic immigrants use transit more than other immigrant groups; however, their assimilation to auto commuting is most rapid.

Foreign-born women use transit more than foreign-born men, for example, but their rate of transit use has dropped steadily from 1980 to 2000, while men's rate has remained the same. Over time, foreign-born blacks and Asians use transit less than their native-born ethnic counterparts, but if they have been in the country less than five years, their use of transit is greater.

Immigrants tend to settle, initially at least, in or near the "ports of entry" in the state, the large urban centers and more densely populated regions, which are better served by transit.

In 35 percent of the state's towns or cities (identified as designated "places" in the Census), either foreign-born or Hispanic people are the majority population. Foreign-born residents account for more than one-third of the population in Los Angeles, one-quarter of the population in the San Francisco Bay Area and more than one-fifth of the population in the Southern, Coastal and Central Valley areas, report Blumenberg and ITS Los Angeles graduate student researcher Lily Song in a forthcoming paper.

At the 2007 TRB annual meeting, Blumenberg explained two theoretical approaches to understanding the phenomenon:

• a spatial-economic assimilation way of thinking, which is the idea that immigrants reside in the central city, particularly ports of entry for new immigrants, until their status improves and they, like other central city residents, move to higher-income neighborhoods, often located in the suburbs, where they rely more heavily on cars, or
• the "ethnic resources" way of thinking, which is the idea that people collect around agglomerations of people of similar ethnicity because of the various benefits associated with sharing an enclave. This enhances their economic strength; immigrants choose the security and benefits of the ethnic enclave over the chance to move out, even if they have the economic means to do so. Because transit works best in the central city, they may continue to rely on transit even if their increased affluence means that they have access to cars.

Numerous related factors play a role in both scenarios, Blumenberg noted, including the number of occupants of a household, their age and gender mix, what their neighborhoods are like, especially if they are not well-served by transit, and job location and accessibility.

Whether or not immigrants continue to use transit depends largely on three factors, according to the data collected by Blumenberg:

• year of arrival, or how long an immigrant has lived in the U.S.,
• the prevalence of driving and cars in the country of origin; for instance the number of passenger cars per capita in Australia, Canada and Western Europe is 15 times that of China, three times Africa's and two times Latin America's; and,
• legal status: can the immigrant legally obtain a driver's license? Recent laws like the one in California prohibit issuing driver's licenses to undocumented residents. Nationally, all but three states require a social security number in order to receive a driver's license, and 38 states require applicants to demonstrate their "lawful presence" in the state.

Blumenberg also found significant differences in car versus transit use. The most significant differences exist between all foreign-born commuters and native non-Hispanic white commuters, and between native and foreign-born Hispanics.

The Hispanic immigrant is almost four times more likely to commute by transit than a native-born commuter of any ethnicity. Partly, this explains the high share of foreign-born transit users, simply because the Hispanic population pool is so large.

The Hispanic immigrant is almost four times more likely to commute by transit than a native-born commuter of any ethnicity.

For all groups, reliance on transit declines substantially based on their number of years in the U.S., but there are ethnic and racial differences, with Hispanics again ultimately the most transit-reliant. Controlling for demographic, household, economic characteristics and geographic variables, including population density and urbanization, Blumenberg and UCLA's Kimiko Shiki ran a series of models to "examine whether assimilation to auto use remained once we controlled for other determinants of transit use." They also controlled for race and ethnicity, foreign-born status and year of arrival.

They have three models to predict the likelihood of transit commuting, again with the focus on years in the U.S. and the rate of assimilation to auto use. They compare, among other things, immigrants to natives of various native ethnic backgrounds and immigrants of different ethnic and racial backgrounds and years in the country.

Some of their findings:

• after 15 years in the U.S.,all immigrants in California are less, not more, likely to commute by transit than native-born commuters;
• all immigrants, regardless of race and ethnicity, are more likely to rely on transit than native-born whites during their first five years in the U.S. But assimilation occurs rather quickly in all immigrant groups. The drop in transit use is fastest among Hispanic immigrants, but because they started out as such heavy transit users, they remain more likely to rely on transit even after more than 20 years in the U.S.
• among Asian and black immigrants, transit use declines: after 15 years, they are less likely to use transit than native-born whites, but with Asians, there is an uptick at 21-plus years in the country, which likely reflects a cohort of immigrants who are older, so age is confounding the overall trend.

What this means for transit policymakers

Blumenberg explained that the initial findings of immigrants' steady abandonment of transit "suggest that transit agencies, at least in California, ought to be concerned about these trends." She added, "Clearly, this trend is going to rob California of some of the most reliable transit users."

But what does this mean for immigrants? she asked. She noted that other studies on auto ownership and economic outcomes, particularly for low-income groups, have shown that there is a positive relationship between cars and positive economic outcomes. "Clearly there needs to be more study as it relates to immigrants, but that relationship is there," she said.

To keep the riders they have and to attract more, agencies need to expand beyond multi-lingual schedules and signs. They need to better address the needs of riders, especially in the central cities, with more frequent service and, perhaps, more flexible routes and schedules to better mimic the advantages that a car provides.

She said, "At least in the short run, these transit agencies are going to quickly lose a reliable source of riders."