The long-run effects on cities of changes in the cost of moving people are examined. Two kinds of policies are compared: those that increase the cost of travel by car, and those that improve the quality or reduce the price of public transportation. The paper argues that the former are likely to reduce auto travel more quickly. However, these policies are also more likely to cause the economies of central cities to decline more rapidly than they would otherwise. A policy of improving and subsidizing public transportation would tend to slow their rate of decline. So far as the economies of central cities are concerned, there is a set of measures that appears to be most damaging. These are the ones that increase the cost of auto travel to central cities or their core areas relative to the cost of auto travel elsewhere in standard metropolitan statistical areas. Reductions in the supply of downtown parking, special taxes on such parking, tolls to the downtown areas, are examples of such measures.

The last two decades have clearly shown that increased automobile ownership and highway construction can facilitate profound redistributions of population and economic activity within metropolitan areas. These changes are related in a fundamental way to many of the social and economic difficulties of our large, mature, central cities: loss of middle and upper income groups to the suburbs, declining retail sales in downtown areas, erosion of the tax base, shift of manufacturing and service establishments to suburban areas, decline of mass transit service and patronage, and increased traffic congestion. There is a great deal of support for the view that there has been too much highway construction and that the time has come to help public transportation. This paper explores some of the issues involved in a program of assistance to public transportation.

An attempt is made to estimate the effects of income and other variables on the pattern of interregional labor migration in Data for the study are contained in the 1960 Population Census of Ghana. The best information regarding migration is the distribution of population partitioned by age and sex by region of birth and region of residence in 1960. Ghana is divided into 7 administrative regions for which the government publishes population data. All data and analyses in this study are based on these 7 regions. The average income per African laborer was estimated for each of the regions. Measures of urbanization and education were derived from census data. Variables which are important in individual decisions were postulated but the form of individual decision functions was not specified. 2 variables are introduced which may account for systematic differences in individual responses: education as measured by the percentage of adult males in the region who have attended school; and urbanization measured by the percentage of regional population residing in towns of 5000 or more. Density of population was used in place of urbanization in 1 instance. A high proportion of the variation in interregional migration rates was explained by each of the functions. Since there were 7 regions in Ghana and 6 destinations corresponding to each origin the regressions were based on 42 observations. All of the coefficients except those for education were of the right or expected sign. Distance was a strong deterrent to migration. The highest elasticities related to income and migrants clearly tended to move to regions with high wage levels. When urbanization was included migration appeared to be more responsive to the level of home income than to income in other regions. If density was used income in other regions becomes more impoortant. Both origin and destination population were significant variables. Migration increased considerably more than in proportion to population of the home region. Migrants were attracted to regions of large population but the effect was less than proportionate. In this empirical analysis the simple dissatisfaction hypothesis concerning the effects of education was refuted. A larger percentage of educated than uneducated people do migrate especially to cities but the results were inconsistent with this observation. In sum it was demonstrated that migration in Ghana is responsive to income differentials. Distance is a strong deterrent to migration and is most likley to surrogate for differences in culture social organizations langage and transport cost. Education was negatively related to migration.