About 6.8 percent of people with jobs in Indianapolis live below the poverty line. If we add those who live near the poverty line – earning less than 150 percent of the poverty rate – then 12.5 percent of working adults could be called “the working poor.”

Whether or not a worker has private transportation is closely linked to poverty. Each vertical bar on the chart represents a means of getting to work, and the color bands indicate earnings. Only 5 percent of working adults who drive a private car to work are in poverty, and only 10 percent are near poverty.

The incomes of workers who ride the bus to work are very different. Thirty-nine percent of bus-riding commuters are below poverty, and another 7 percent are near poor. Those who work at home have an income profile similar to those who drive to work in a private car.

You may think that this chart illustrates the obvious: people don’t have cars if they are too poor to afford them. But the point is not that they don’t have cars because they are poor, but that they are poor because they don’t have cars. The Central Indiana economy offers many opportunities, including tens of thousands of jobs that pay a good wage without requiring a college degree. But as the physical location of jobs spreads out over a wider area, opportunities increasingly are available only to people who can get to them with a private car.