Transportation Jobs Are Good Jobs

I’ll be speaking soon on a panel about transportation investments that’s part of an EPI/Demos conference on investing in a better economy. As part of EPI’s burgeoning interest in transportation policy, they have this chart:

This is a fairly interesting finding. Relative to the economy as a whole, jobs created through transportation investments are disproportionately likely to not require a college degree. But they’re disproportionately un-likely to fall into the “low-wage” bottom 20 percent of the income distribution. So when dollars are shifted out of current consumption and into transportation investments, this has the effect of pulling people in low-wage jobs into better jobs for which many of them are perfectly well-qualified. And in the end, that should be good for the earnings potential of even those left behind in the low-wage sector.

Of course that doesn’t say anything about what kind of transportation you spend it on. Clearly, though, this works much better as economic policy if you spend it on useful transportation—fixing roads in existing core areas, building out rail transit systems, intercity high-speed rail in a few key corridors, etc.—that could help reduce the economic drag of chronic congestion.