What the numbers mean and where they come from
Transportation costs are estimated for the typical household living in your region and include all travel, not just commuting. Trips to the grocery store, nights at the movies, kids to and from school or soccer … these all add up. We count money spent on car ownership and use, as well as public transit use. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are only for household auto use. The data used in Abogo comes from the Housing and Transportation (H+T®) Affordability Index developed by the Center for Neighborhood Technology.
How transportation costs are calculated
This part is a bit geeky, so feel free to scan the illustrated version of our cost model below. If you want to know the details, check out the methods section of the H+T Index. If you’re more of a Cliff’s Notes person, here’s the short story:
Abogo’s transportation costs are based on the H+T Index, which was constructed to estimate three dependent variables (auto ownership, auto use, and transit use) as functions of 14 independent variables (median income, average household size, average commuters per household, residential density, Employment Access Index, Employment Mix Index, block density, Bus Transit Connectivity Index, Other Transit Connectivity Index, Transit Access Shed, and jobs in the Transit Access Shed). To hone in on the built environment’s influence on transportation costs, the independent household variables (income, household size, and commuters per household) are set at fixed values to control for any variation they might cause. By establishing and running the model for a “typical household” (one defined as earning the area median income, having the regional average household size, and having the regional average number of commuters per household), we can chalk up any variation in transportation costs to place and location, not household characteristics. Location matters.
Abogo provides the average costs for the area immediately surrounding an address.
A more detailed explanation of how the numbers are derived, including the sources for the data used, can be found in the methods section of the H+T Index.