Job Access and Reverse Commute (jarc) Program fy 2009 Service Profiles Region X alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington October 2010 fta-08-0162 Job Access and Reverse Commute (jarc) fy 2009 Service Profiles: Region X

Location: Spokane Transit (PTBA) (WA)
Type: Information-Based Services/Information materials/marketing
Goal: Improved customer knowledge
Service description: This project began with a simple visual representation of a common challenge people face when looking for employment. They live in one place; the childcare they know is not close to where they live; and the jobs are not close by either. The distances represented in this triangle do not allow for practical transportation choices between home/work/childcare. Low-incomes and low skill levels exacerbate these problems and limit choices. While it might be more costly, people with reliable private vehicles can live, work, and use day care where they choose. However, lack of reliable transportation is a major impediment for many people who want to work. Public transportation helps alleviate this barrier – but transit is most effective when the points of the triangle are closer together generating reasonable routing and travel times.
The LIFTS goal was to help people make choices related to jobs, daycare, and housing in order to maximize the use of public transportation and reduce travel time. The challenge for LIFTS was to produce an interactive, Internet-based visual tool that would help job seekers “see” in a spatial world how a particular choice would affect their real world triangle of home/work/daycare.
GIS takes data sets, or layers, and put them together in a way to produce new data. All the information that LIFTS needed already existed. Spokane Transit has bus routes and bus route information. Northeast Washington Housing Solutions knows about affordable housing. Washington State has information regarding licensed day care facilities, and information about employment sites is available from a variety of sources. Because there has not been a workforce dedicated to working on this project, it has taken since 2006 to develop the analytical functions that allow all these different layers from different sources to interact with one another. While the interaction between the layers is important, it was imperative that the information be easy to access and easy to use. Both of these goals have been accomplished and the development of the project is in its final stages. Currently, the draft LIFTS website is http://lifts.wsu.edu/