Commuting inequality in urban China: Social stratification, hukou gaps, and city-level variation in estimated peak-hour commutes

Abstract

Commuting inequality reflects uneven access to housing, jobs, and mobility, yet national evidence on its social patterning in urban China remains limited. We link the 2015 China 1% Population Sample Survey to Baidu Maps API estimates of weekday morning peak-hour travel time to examine how hukou status, occupation, education, and city context shape estimated commuting time across 290 Chinese cities. Commuting times are generated by querying driving, walking, bike-riding, and public-transit routes between residential and workplace subdistrict centroids during 7:00–9:00 on weekdays and matching each worker to the mode reported in the survey. Within cities, workers with local hukou are associated with estimated one-way commutes 11.8 min shorter than those of non-local workers, net of city and commuting-mode fixed effects. Lower education and service or production occupations are also associated with longer commuting times, though less strongly than hukou status. City-specific hukou gaps vary substantially, but are generally smaller in denser and more spatially compact cities. At the city level, population concentration is associated with both a narrower hukou commuting gap and lower commuting-time inequality. Results are robust to excluding cities with post-2015 metro expansion. The findings show how institutional status and urban context jointly structure commuting inequality in China.