Abstract
This is the first study that analyzes two-worker and single-worker households’ commuting behavior in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Areas. This study uses “Excess commuting” to test how important commuting distance is for urban workers to choose their residential and job locations in Los Angeles area. Individual location data used are from the Transit Panel Study Survey, 1991. The results show that commuting distance is still an important factor for urban workers to make location decisions, contrary to other study results. I find that if two-worker households’ commuting distance optimization process is restricted by their members job locations, two-worker households’ excess commute is smaller than single-worker households’. Also, the results suggest that spatial mismatch restricts unskilled workers in single-worker households more than it restricts workers from other groups. Further, the results show that the commuting distances of two-worker households are affected more by jobs-housing balance in the region than are the commuting distances of single-worker households. I find that two-worker household males behave differently from two-worker household females, and that two-worker household females behave differently from single-worker household females. I also find that there are sharper gender differences among whites than among nonwhites.