Research Brief on ETI Driver's License Studies

Abstract

A critical issue facing central city Milwaukee residents is access to jobs -- jobs that are increasingly beyond the Milwaukee County bus lines. The spatial mismatch between available jobs and job seekers is most acute in low-income Milwaukee neighborhoods, where job seekers have outnumbered full-time openings by a gap of seven to one and only a third of unemployed job seekers have a valid driver's license. From 1998-2017 the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Employment and Training Institute conducted extensive employment research on the importance of a driver's license.