ORIGIN AND NEED

Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America, released in 2011, represented a landmark research effort of the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, a Washington, D.C.-based, non-partisan think tank. Its findings first shed light on the relative paucity of transit in the Tampa Bay area. Among the 100 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area (Hernando, Hillsborough, Pasco, and Pinellas counties) ranked just 93rd in terms of job access.

Seeking to understand how proposed enhancements to transit service might improve job access, using an enhanced methodology relative to the Brookings analysis, the Partnership in 2019 and 2020 worked with the University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory and modeled several levels of investment within the Tampa-St. PetersburgClearwater MSA. The Regional Competitiveness Report, produced annually since 2017, benchmarks the larger Tampa Bay region against 19 peer and aspirational communities across more than 50 indicators of economic competitiveness and prosperity. In each edition of the report, produced by the Tampa Bay Partnership in collaboration with the Community Foundation of Tampa Bay and United Way Suncoast, the larger region has ranked dead last in terms of transit supply as measured by vehicle revenue miles.

A complementary research effort, Tampa Bay E-Insights, produced by the Center for Analytics and Creativity at the USF Muma College of Business, has identified transit supply as the key to lowering the poverty rate, dampening rising income inequality, and improving economic mobility among Tampa Bay’s residents.

Significant transit investments do more than take cars off the road, enhance air quality, and promote sustainable growth – they can change the trajectory of lives.

Among the 100 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area (Hernando, Hillsborough, Pasco, and Pinellas counties) ranked just 93rd in terms of job access.