SPINNING THEIR WHEELS
On a rainy Wednesday morning in January, Keidreana Sims and Kristin Johnson are headed to their first day of work at Sterilite, a plastics factory about 30 miles south of Dallas in Ennis. The sisters are excited: The warehouse job pays $13 an hour, with a potential raise to $14 after a few weeks of good attendance. They check their phones every few minutes, nervous about being on time for the 7 a.m. orientation.
“I like warehouse jobs,” Johnson says. “And warehouse jobs are far out.”
Neither Johnson, 22, nor Sims, 20, has a car—they can’t afford one. So before they could start at Sterilite, they had to figure out if they could even get there.
Just finding the job presented logistical hurdles. To get to a staffing agency in the suburb of DeSoto, Johnson and Sims walked from the home they share with their mother in Fair Park to a nearby rail station and took the train to the University of North Texas Dallas stop in far southern Dallas, just north of Interstate 20. There, they waited on a bus that comes by once an hour, and only during morning and afternoon rush hours. Although their neighborhood is about two miles from downtown—tucked between interstates 30 and 45—a trip that would have taken 25 minutes by car was nearly two hours by transit.
The longer the average commute in
