Can traffic jam job growth?

There’s plenty of talk these days about what creates new jobs. But a UCI doctoral candidate has measured the effect of something that kills jobs, something Southern Californians know all about: traffic congestion.

Kent Hymel, a doctoral candidate in economics, has managed to calculate how much heavy traffic affects employment, according to a paper he published online in the Journal of Urban Economics.

In his study, Hymel analyzed the amount of time drivers waste on the road and estimated how much time would be saved by various solutions. It finds that if freeway capacity in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which includes Orange County, had been increased by 10% in 1990, the region would have added another 50,000 jobs by 2003 from saved commute times alone.

“People tend to demand higher wages from employers if they have to face a long commute to work,” Hymel said. “You can also think of it this way: If you’re a big company trying to decide where to locate a manufacturing plant, you have higher shipping costs with congestion.

“As manager of a firm, you can take those costs into consideration. It increases the cost of doing business.”

The problem Hymel tackled isn’t easy, UCI economics professor and urban economics expert Jan Brueckner said. The numbers get muddled because not only does traffic hurt employment, but higher employment also causes traffic, he said.

“Employment and traffic congestion sort of feed on one another,” Brueckner said. “If you have a lot of employment, you probably have some congestion. That’s reverse causality. Economists are good at untangling reverse causality, and Kent did a good job at that in this paper.”

What Hymel did to avoid that problem was to find other variables related to traffic congestion that didn’t have much to do with employment. The ones he found were the presence of federal highways and the influence of local legislators on transportation committees in Congress. The more highways, or the better-connected local representatives were, the less congestion the area would see in decades to come, Hymel said.

Knowing those relationships, Hymel was able to use statistical techniques to cancel out everything but the effect of employment, he said.

But there’s one thing the study doesn’t answer that he hopes to find in the future: if those jobs are lost forever, or merely pushed to another city with less traffic.

“One thing I’m curious about, is whether if there’s congestion in Los Angeles, is that actually going to cause employment growth in another nearby city?” he said. “Does that just mean the jobs are just moving to Phoenix or Las Vegas or San Diego?”

MICHAEL ALEXANDER may be reached at (714) 966-4618 or at [email protected].