Access to transportation is crucial to ensuring that people can meet their basic needs and participate in society and the economy. It goes without saying that if people can’t get where they need to go, they will struggle to work and learn, to buy food, to see friends and family, and to receive medical care.

When a person can’t regularly move from place to place in a safe or timely manner because they lack the resources necessary for transportation, that person is experiencing transportation insecurity. Until recently, the number of people experiencing transportation insecurity in the United States had been a mystery, largely because researchers have lacked the tools to measure transportation insecurity.

Thankfully, this is no longer the case. Yesterday, my colleagues Alexandra Murphy, Jamie Griffin, Karina McDonald-Lopez, Natasha Pilkauskas (all of the University of Michigan), and I published new findings that use a novel measurement tool—the Transportation Security Index—to quantify the prevalence of transportation insecurity in the United States.

When my co-authors and I administered the Transportation Security Index questionnaire to a nationally representative sample of 1,999 adults aged 25 and older in the United States, the results were striking. In 2018, the year of the data collection, about 1 in 4 adults experienced transportation insecurity, with nearly 1 in 10 experiencing moderate or high levels of insecurity.

Read the full article about transportation insecuirty by Alix Gould-Werth at Washington Center for Equitable Growth.