Commuter mobility: an indicator of municipality attraction

Siv Schéele, Stockholm University
Gunnar Andersson, Stockholm University

In the present paper, we study the behavior of commuters in the Mälar region that surrounds Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. The purpose is to get better insight into what factors that may be related to municipalities’ different levels of attraction. We study individual commuter behavior by means of Swedish register data on place of residence and place of work place for all residents in the region. Our baseline year is 2005 and we study the extent to which commuters change their behavior during a one-year follow up. Longitudinal micro-data on place of work and residence, and commuters’ various individual socio-demographic characteristics are linked to data on a range of municipality characteristics. Our data are complemented with standardized data on travel distances and travel times. We analyze the propensity of commuters to end commuting – by means of change of residence to the municipality where their workplace is located or by changing the workplace to the municipality where they live – by means of multinomial logistic regression. Migration rates and change of workplace rates are shown to decrease with the number of years being a commuter. The relative risks of domestic migration are strongly related to socio-demographic variables, whereas the relative risks of change of workplace mainly vary with individuals’ economic variables such as earned income and commuting distance. The relative risks of migration and change of workplace also vary with the characteristics of the municipalities involved. We demonstrate that the attraction of a municipality in terms of residence increases with the general accessibility to workplaces in the municipality and decreases with its level of housing prices. An increased supply of new dwellings in a municipality has a greater impact on the capacity to increase its population than has an increased supply of workplaces.