Jonathan Peters, Variation in Household Spending on Transportation Services – Urban, Rural and City Specific Differences
Dr. Jonathan Peters, Professor of Finance at The College of Staten Island of the City University of New York, presents a seminar at C2SMART on “Variation in Household Spending on Transportation Services – Urban, Rural and City Specific Differences.”
U.S. Households spend roughly 17% of their household income on transportation services. Yet as Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Economist Geoffrey Paulin discussed in a recent Monthly Labor Review paper “Fun facts about Millennials: comparing expenditure patterns from the latest through the Greatest generation” (MLR March 2018), households of various generations are exhibiting different patterns of consumption with respect to transportation services. Further, household consumption of transportation services varies by location – with urban and rural users having different patterns of service usage – and these patterns also vary between metropolitan regions. Utilizing data from the BLS Consumer Expenditures Survey, we will expand on prior work by Peters, King, Gordon and Santiago and explore the component parts of transportation spending in U.S. households. In particular, we look to further study spending on road tolls, taxi type services, fuel use, mass transit fares and the overall cost of automobile ownership by geographic and demographic area. We will present results segregated by income class, educational status, race, age and household geographic location and we will explore how these expenditures have changed over the last three decades.
Jonathan R. Peters is a professor of finance in the Accounting and Finance Department in The Business School of The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York. He is also a member of the Doctoral Faculty in the Ph.D. Programs in the Economics and the Earth and Environmental Science at the CUNY Graduate School and is a Research Fellow at The University Transportation Research Center at The City College of New York. Dr. Peters has and is serving as an expert on panels at the National Academy of Sciences and is a subject matter expert in the areas of transportation finance, social justice and road pricing. He is a member of the Congestion Pricing Committee at the Transportation Research Board. He was recently appointed chair of the Economics of Pricing Joint Sub-Committee at The Transportation Research Board. He currently conducts research in the areas of regional planning, road and mass transit financing, corporate and public sector performance metrics, social justice, capital costs and performance management. He has recently published in Transportation Research, the Journal of Public Transportation and the Transportation Research Record of the National Academy of Sciences.
