Introduction

A significant and troublesome form of environmental injustice in the US is the physical isolation of the inner-city poor to rising suburban job opportunities. Unlike many parts of the developed and developing world, the poor and ‘have nots’ are principally concentrated in and near the urban centers of many US metropolitan areas, occupying working-class neighborhoods long abandoned by the middle class for ‘greener pastures’ (accelerated by the US’s massive freeway building programs of the post-Second World War period). The concentration of jobless individuals in the center and explosion of jobs on the fringe has given rise to ‘reverse commutes’, both in terms of actual work trips for those fortunate enough to have a job and latent demand for those who cannot find work, whether for reasons of poor mobility options or structural employment problems.

In the US, reverse commutes have increased steadily over the past two decades and continue to capture a growing share of the total journey-to-work ‘travel pie’. In 1990, reverse commutes made up over 10% of metropolitan trips nationwide and preliminary data from the 2000 census suggest that this percentage has risen since then (Pisarksi, 1996). Reverse commute has been especially pronounced in large, heavily urbanized states like California. Between 1980 and 1990, Southern California recorded the second-largest relative increase in share of reverse commuting nationwide (Rossetti and Eversole, 1993).

The location-liberating effects of cyberspace and telematics, along with rising affluence, have conspired to create a new geomorphology for economic production across the US; sprawling corporate enclaves, business parks, power centers, and other ‘non-nodal’ forms of development. Today, all US metropolitan areas (with the exception of New York and Chicago) have the majority of office space outside of traditional city centers. While 38% of all office space in US metropolitan areas was located in primary downtowns in 1999, nearly the same amount (37%) was found in highly dispersed clusters with less than five million square feet of space (Lang, 2003). Decentralisation of office-sector work, along with residences, has further prompted more and more retail and service jobs to shift to the suburbs, the kind of jobs that low-skilled individuals most often secure.