How the Twin Cities' Transit Expansion Will Improve Access to Jobs

In the U.S. overall, there aren’t enough jobs to go around. But that’s not the case in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, where one job opening exists for each unemployed person, according to a 2015 report. The problem, however, is that while these vacancies are clustered in the suburbs, the people who could potentially fill them live in the urban centers. As with many other U.S. metros, prospective workers in the Twin Cities remain disconnected from job-rich areas.

A group of researchers at the University of Minnesota, led by Yingling Fan, associate professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, took a deep dive into this spatial mismatch in a new report. Using GIS mapping, they visualized the potential effect of recently proposed transit expansions in the region. Below are their two main findings: