Travel time for households to child care settings is of policy concern for a variety of reasons.  First, travel time can be a cost imposed on households similar to cash costs of tuition payments to providers, although subsidies for transportation to child care are rarely available.  Second, relatively little work has been done on the location of child care settings of different types relative to children’s residences.  The role of transportation in educational choice is widely discussed for K-12 schooling -- provision of school busing is often acknowledged as a requirement for effective school choice programs.  Yet geographic access to child care settings is rarely discussed.   The local availability of child care can either compensate for or exacerbate inequality of access due to transportation challenges.  While busing is unlikely to be a solution for toddlers, geographic considerations could lead to preferences for vouchers and funded slots which can more easily distribute subsidized slots throughout a community relative to publicly funded centers, which can be near to only so many children.  Third, much child care policy is quite local, including pre-kindergarten programming by school districts and child care subsidies defined according to local market areas. The implications of this locally defined policy setting have not been fully understood in terms of geographic access to care.

As a contribution to this discussion, this paper looks at data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 Cohort, which has collected data on travel time to regular child care arrangements every three years for the children of a nationally representative sample of adults born 1980 to 1984.  Using these data, we will report travel times by parent characteristics, type of care, and characteristics of the location of residence. In addition, we will compare out of pocket costs for care with the imputed costs of travel time based on parents’ hourly rates of compensation.  These data will help illuminate families’ access to different types of child care and the contribution of travel costs to total costs paid by parents for their children’s care, thus making an ongoing contribution to the discussion of differential access to early care and education.