Job decentralization and transportation use in a monocentric city

Our objective in this paper is twofold: first, we want to give a theoretical founding to empirical findings of several works that emphasize the fact that while distance traveled increases with household location distance from the city center, transportation time tends to decrease, thus offering a strong incentive to sprawl. Second, we want to analyze the impact of job dispersal on city size, overall distance traveled and transportation cost, along with other urban variables, and spatial equity. We therefore develop an extended monocentric model of city taking into account employment dispersal and varying unit commuting costs. Using this model, we show that under specific conditions including employment dispersal and high marginal transportation cost around city center, the distance traveled by households from home to workplace increases with their distance from the city center, while private transportation costs they endure decrease. Then, based on a surplus analysis, we show that city size moderately increases with the level of employment dispersal, while overall home-to-work distance traveled decreases, suggesting that job decentralization might entail savings in social costs of transportation. However, our findings show that such dispersal could entail spatial inequity: the households living near the city center could suffer a welfare loss.