Impact of Bike Facilities on Residential Property Prices

Abstract

As many cities are investing in street improvements or transportation infrastructure upgrades to provide better bike access or more complete bike networks, many practitioners, planners, and policy makers are seeking more conclusive evidence about the economic value of bike infrastructure and bike facilities. With the use of residential property values as indicators of consumer preferences for bicycle infrastructure, many scholars have shown the importance of green space and off-street bike trails as amenities valuable to property owners. However, empirical evidence on the relationship of on-street bike facilities and property values remains relatively inconsistent. The unique focus of this study was advanced bike facilities that represented higher levels of bike priority or bike infrastructure investments shown to be more desirable to a larger portion of the population. Through the separate estimation of ordinary least squares hedonic pricing models and spatial autoregressive hedonic models of single and multifamily properties, it was found that proximity to advanced bike facilities (measured by distance) had significant and positive effects on all property values, which highlighted household preferences for high-quality bike infrastructure. Furthermore, the study showed that the extensiveness of the bike network (measured by density) was a positive and statistically significant contributor to the prices for all property types, even after proximity was controlled for with respect to bike facilities and other property, neighborhood, and transaction characteristics. Finally, estimated coefficients were applied to assess the property value impacts of the Green Loop (i.e., the proposed Portland, Oregon, signature bike infrastructure concept), which illustrated the importance of considering the accessibility and the extensiveness of bike facility networks.