The Impact of Commuting Costs on Employment Decisions among Low-Income Workers in Satarkul, Badda, Dhaka

Abstract The fast expansion of the urban periphery in Dhaka, Bangladesh has increased spatial inequality and has forced low-wage workers to move to under-served transition areas. This study investigates how commuting costs influence the employment decisions of low-income workers in Satarkul, Badda and the level of spatial mismatch and transport poverty in the periphery labor supply. We hypothesize that the combination of long transit delays and high first- and last-mile travel costs will erode the wage premiums offered by centralized economic agglomerations and push vulnerable workers into localized, informal and lower-paying jobs. The study adopted a qualitative secondary analysis design that merged empirical peer-reviewed literature, municipal documentation (RAJUK Detailed Area Plan 2022–2035), and institutional surveys published between 2010 and 2026 using inductive topic synthesis and source triangulation. The findings reveal that spending on commuting acts as a regressive economic tax, draining 18% to 32% of daily wages through an unregulated informal “feeder penalty.” Anything above 2.5 hours of round-trip commute regularly causes chronic physical weariness and time impoverishment. This leads to a threshold of informal reservation for laborers, leading to higher turnover in formal central hubs, voluntary geographic enclosure and forced absorption into hyper-local informal trade and casual labor. The spatial trapping inhibits female workers more than anybody else, as their movement is limited by safety concerns at the street level and prohibitively expensive secure transit alternatives. Keywords: Commuting costs; Low-income employment; Spatial mismatch; Transport poverty; Informal labor