Florida Watch: Florida cities can't get their people to work

New York and NJ benefit from Rick Scott's rejection of public transportation funds

23 AUGUST 2011

Gov. Rick Scott loves to use the phrase "let's go to work," but another problem to list on top of his job-building woes is that people in Florida literally can't get to work.

Scott rejected federal funds for that high-speed rail project. A recent transportation analysis has ranked the nation's metropolitan areas by the share of jobs that the average person could reach by public transportation within 90 minutes.

Florida metropolitan areas occupy four out of the top ten spots where people don't have access to many of the jobs in their area, and no other state occurs on the list twice.

The list, from 24/7 Wall St., cites that more than 7.5 million American households don't own an automobile, and while most of the people in those households live within a mile of a public transit stop, those people can reach only around 40 percent of the jobs in their metropolitan area within 90 minutes.

The Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach area ranks ninth worst in the nation, Orlando-Kissimmee ranks eighth, Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater ranks seventh, and Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville ranks as the absolute worst in the nation.

In the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach area, 97.2 percent of people are considered "covered" by public transportation, although the typical resident of the area can reach only 19.7 percent of the jobs in the area within an hour and a half.

How could that possibly be, with one of the highest rates of public-transportation coverage in the nation? According to 24/7 Wall St., it's partly due to "a lack of rapid transit, which prevents people from being able to reach jobs in a reasonable amount of time."

Up in the Palm Bay area, just 8.3 percent of jobs can be reached within 90 minutes, although the high-speed rail route wouldn't have gone through the area anyway.

In other news, Scott managed to give $745 million to New York and New Jersey transportation yesterday.

24/7 Wall St.'s list of "Cities Where Americans Can't Get to Work" can be found here.

Read more:
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/2011/08/florida_metros_dominate_l...

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