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If a man cannot afford a car, and public transit is beth in- adequate and too expensive, and his job has shifted to a suburb, while racial and economic segregation prevent him from follow- ing the job that man is effectively isolated from carning a living. Further, the 40 percent in the under $4,000 income group who do own a car must bear the heavy financial burden of operating and insurance cost automobile ownership today entails.

Even within families owning a car, wives, children, and youths are often immobilized because the family's sole vehicle is committed to a home-work trip. Forty-nine percent of white families have two or more wage carners, but only 28 percent have two cars; 55 percent of all Negro families have two or more wage carners, but only 10 percent have two cars. While substantial numbers of the disadvantaged ride as passengers in automobiles, their freedom to change jobs (which increas- ingly are located in the urban fringe), or to take advantage of even the basic social amenities of metropolitan living, is seriously hampered, almost as much for those with no access to automobiles at all.

The beeline distance between South Central Los Angeles and Santa Monica, a center of employment, is 16 miles; to make the trip by public transportation takes an hour and 50 minutes, requires three transfers and costs 83 cents one way. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) demonstration project in Watts has shown that when direct transportation service was provided for residents of that dis- trict to jobs and other opportunities in other parts of the city. ridership increased from 800 to 2,800 daily in 3 months. Many of the new riders were bound for work.

From central Brooklyn, it is casier and faster to reach certain areas of the Bronx some 15 miles away than nearby industrial districts only 4 miles away, if the traveler must use public trans- portation. Also, certain poverty areas, while theoretically in the "one-fare" zone, require a double transit fare to reduce walk- ing and travel time to a reasonable level. And this is in a city with the best public transit system in the United States. As more central business district jobs become white-collar, and an ever larger proportion of unskilled and semiskilled jobs move to outlying sections, poor people are more disadvantaged than ever by public transportation systems which focus on cen- tral business districts and also stop at city limits. A New York study reports, "The employment in suburban areas of both poverty and nonpoverty workers residing in the areas studied in New York City (poverty areas) appears to be almost insignifi- cant." One reason is an often cited figure: It would cost a resi- dent of central Harlem in New York some $40 a month to commute by public transportation to an aircraft factory in Farmingdale, Long Island.

The poor are not only isolated from jobs, but also from social and health services, recreation areas, and social contacts out- side the immediate neighborhood. A HUD demonstration project in Nashville, Tenn., has provided bus service for out-16