Building the metropolis: Subway expansion, land use regulation, and welfare

The effect of subway policies on gasoline consumption: Subway expansion versus fare changes

Enhancing private transportation: The positive spillovers from Santiago’s subway expansion

Subway expansion, residential relocation, and travel behavior: Causal evidence from China

Beyond half-mile circle: Measuring the impact of subway expansion on home-based travels in Beijing, China

We estimate an equilibrium sorting model of housing location and commuting mode choice with endogenous traffic congestion to evaluate urban transportation policies. Leveraging fine-scale data from travel diaries and housing transactions identifying residents' home and work locations, we recover rich preference heterogeneity over both travel mode and residential location decisions. While different policies produce the same congestion reduction, their impacts on social welfare differ drastically. In addition, sorting undermines the congestion reduction under driving restrictions and subway expansion but strengthens it under congestion pricing. The combination of congestion pricing and subway expansion delivers the greatest congestion relief and efficiency gains. (JEL H76, O18, P25, R23, R31, R41, R48)

A time interval metric for cumulative opportunity accessibility

We explore the potential of incorporating accessibility analysis in addressing the impact of subway expansions on the real estate market. We first demonstrate that by using increases in accessibility to jobs as a continuous treatment variable, rather than adopting a binary station dummy approach, we achieve better goodness-of-fit in a quasi-experimental econometric analysis. Furthermore, accessibility measures allow the exploration of impacts beyond the local effects around new subway stations, shedding light on a network impact that has been largely overlooked to date. To increase the external validity of our findings, we apply the same analysis to the cities of Santiago (Chile), Sao Paulo (Brazil), Singapore, and Barcelona (Spain). and then explore the emergent patterns. We argue that the integration of urban economics and transportation analysis via the use of accessibility measures constitutes an innovation in the empirical approach commonly adopted in the literature. The use of such measures in causal empirical studies on transportation impacts can yield more robust and comprehensive results and capture nuanced spatial heterogeneity effects.

Abstract We identify and quantify the impact of subways on equalising academic achievement in an urban school choice setting. Specifically, we study the short- and medium-term effects of a massive subway network expansion in Chile on the academic achievement gap between low- and high-performing students. Estimates are derived using fixed-effects models. Closer proximity to the subway network is associated with the equalisation of academic achievements. In the medium-term (3 years after the opening of the subway stations), the gap between low- and high-achievers decreased by 5% of a standard deviation.

Why do some neighborhoods thrive, and others do not? While the importance of the local amenity mix has been established as a key determinant of local livability, its link to urban transport infrastructure remains understudied, partially due to a lack of data. Using spatiotemporal social media data from Foursquare, we analyze the impact of metro stations which opened between 2014 and 2017 on the amenity mix of surrounding neighborhoods in nine European cities: Rome, Milan, Barcelona, Budapest, Warsaw, Sofia, Vienna, Helsinki, and Stuttgart. Thereby, we study three properties of the local amenity mix: its density, multifunctionality, and the heterogeneity between amenity types. For this purpose, we propose a new measurement of multifunctionality, which calculates the entropy of the locally present amenity set incorporating the degree of similarity between amenity types. For causal inference, we use Difference-in-Difference Regression based on Propensity Score Matching and Entropy Balancing. Our findings show that in most cities, subway expansion had a significant positive impact on the local amenity density and multifunctionality and that especially the social amenities—Arts & Entertainment, Restaurants and Nightlife—responded strongly. Moreover, considerable agglomeration forces seem to prevail, causing existing subcenters to benefit most from new metro stations.

The unequal allocation of healthcare resources raises many fundamental problems, one of which is how to address inequity in population health. This paper focuses on disparities in public transport healthcare accessibility, with a special focus on an expanding subway system. Based on a vulnerability index, including factors that are likely to limit healthcare opportunities, a two-step floating catchment area method was used to assess the distribution of supply and demand for healthcare. Quantity, quality, and walking distance accessibility were aggregated into hexagonal grids. The Theil index was used to measure inequity and understand the influence of subways on spatial disparities in healthcare accessibility. The ongoing construction of the subway has heterogeneous impacts on healthcare accessibility for different parts of the city and exacerbates spatial inequity in many areas. In an environment where people in peri-urban areas are excluded from healthcare access because of low subway coverage, the results suggest that the potential for subways to address inaccessibility is limited. The findings highlight the requirement of efficient public transport services and are relevant to researchers, planners, and policymakers aiming to improve accessibility to healthcare, especially for populations who dwell in winter cities.

We explore the potential of incorporating accessibility analysis in studying the impact of subway expansions on the real estate market. We first demonstrate that using increases in accessibility to firms as a continuous treatment variable instead of its binary alternative, the station-dummy approach, yields better goodness-of-fit in a quasi-experimental econometric analysis. We show that the dummy treatment variable consistently reported overestimated coefficients of impact for new subway stations. Furthermore, accessibility measures allow the exploration of impacts beyond the local effects around new subway stations, shedding light on network impact that has been largely overlooked in the literature. To provide greater external validity to our results, we apply the same analysis to the cities of Santiago (Chile), Sao Paulo (Brazil), Singapore, and Barcelona (Spain) and explore the common results. We argue that the integration of urban economics and transportation analysis can bring innovation to the empirical approach commonly adopted in the literature, and the use of accessibility measures in causal empirical studies on transportation impacts can produce more robust and comprehensive results and capture the nuanced spatial heterogeneity effects.

We estimate an equilibrium model of residential sorting with endogenous traffic congestion to evaluate the efficiency and equity impacts of urban transportation policies. Leveraging fine-scale data on household travel diaries and housing transactions with home and work locations in Beijing, we jointly estimate travel mode and residential location decisions. The estimation highlights the importance of incorporating work commute in housing decisions and features preference heterogeneity for the ease of work commute by gender. Counterfactual simulations show that while different policies can attain the same level of congestion reduction, their impacts on residential sorting and social welfare are drastically different. First, a driving restriction intensifies income-stratified urban structure where high-income households live closer to subway and work. Distance-based congestion pricing reduces the spatial separation between residence and workplace across income levels, while subway expansion does the opposite. Second, residential sorting strengthens the effectiveness of congestion pricing in improving traffic conditions but undermines that of the driving restriction and subway expansion. Third, the driving restriction is welfare reducing as it leads to large distortions on travel choices. Congestion pricing improves welfare but is regressive, highlighting the need to recycle revenue to address the associated equity concern. Finally, congestion pricing and subway expansion when combined deliver the largest congestion relief and efficiency gain and at the same time achieve self-financing, with revenue from congestion pricing fully covering the cost of subway expansion.

Subway expansion and the rise in the spatial disparity of consumer amenities

Agglomeration, housing affordability, and new firm formation: The role of subway network

New York City witnessed the construction of one of the largest subway systems in the world in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Expansion virtually ceased thereafter, and New York’s public transportation has since relied on a legacy of aging infrastructure. The explanation of this unexpected cessation is key to understanding the city’s current transit problems, and also offers valuable lessons for other cities experiencing infrastructure construction booms. Identifying the 1951 bond issue as a key turning point, this article argues that there are three convergent factors that brought about the end of subway expansion after the Second World War: political leadership distracted by disputes over administration and unable to plan for the long term; financial constraints imposed by construction and labor-cost inflation, the strained municipal budget, and declining ridership; and the New York transit authorities’ indifference to the growing demographic, political, and symbolic significance of the rapidly growing suburbs.

The housing affordability issue in mega-cities creates a significant job-housing mismatch and undermines productive new business creation. This paper focuses on Beijing and investigates whether improved accessibility via the subway network helps new firms benefit from agglomeration economies and, at the same time, provides workers with easy access the low-cost rental housing. Using commercial rental housing transaction records and dynamic bilateral subway travel time from 2010-2015, we build the measure of the accessibility to business clusters and low-cost rental housing through the subway network at a high spatial resolution. Taking advantage of exogenous shocks from the network reconfiguration due to the rapid subway expansion in Beijing, we employ a matched difference-in-differences estimation in multiple periods to identify the causal elasticity estimate of the new firm formation with respect to the accessibility to business clusters and low-cost rental housing. We demonstrate that the subway network is more conducive to firm establishments. The effects are more salient for firms in skill intensive sectors. New skill-intensive firms increase by 0.44% given a 1% increase in the accessibility to business clusters. The elasticity of new skill-intensive firms of with respect to the accessibility to low-cost rental housing is about 0.74. Our findings justify the use of transit-oriented development to spur on new skill-intensive businesses. We point to the importance of an efficient public transit system capable of serving the dispersed workforce and improving the efficiency of new firm location choice.

Major cities in China and many other fast-growing economies are expanding their subway systems in order to address worsening air pollution and traffic congestion. This paper quantifies the impact of subway expansion on air quality by leveraging fine-scale air quality data and the rapid build-out of 14 new subway lines and 252 stations in Beijing from 2008 to 2016. Our main empirical framework examines how the density of the subway network affects air quality across different locations in the city during this period. To address the potential endogenous location of subway stations, we construct an instrument based on historical subway planning, long before air pollution and traffic congestion were of concern. Our analysis shows that an increase in subway density by one standard deviation improves air quality by two percent and the result is robust to a variety of alternative specifications including the distance-based difference-in-differences method. The total discounted health benefit during a 20-year period from reduced mortality and morbidity as a result of 14 new subway lines amounts to $1.0–3.1 billion, or only 1.4–4.4 percent of the total construction and operating cost.

Major cities in China and many other fast-growing economies are expanding their subway systems in order to address worsening air pollution and traffic congestion. This paper quantifies the impact of subway expansion on air quality by leveraging fine-scale air quality data and the rapid build-out of 14 new subway lines and 252 stations in Beijing from 2008 to 2016. Our main empirical framework examines how the density of the subway network affects air quality across different locations in the city during this period. To address the potential endogenous location of subway stations, we construct an instrument based on historical subway planning, long before air pollution and traffic congestion were of concern. Our analysis shows that an increase in subway density by one standard deviation improves air quality by two percent and the result is robust to a variety of alternative specifications including the distance-based difference-in-differences method. The total discounted health benefit during a 20-year period from reduced mortality and morbidity as a result of 14 new subway lines amounts to $1.0-3.1 billion, or 1.4-4.4 percent of the total construction and operating cost.

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the effects of subway network expansion on housing rent in existing station areas in Seoul, where subway lines had been added continuously during the sample period from 2000 to 2012. Due to network expansion, some existing stations have been enjoying improvements in network accessibility while others have not. The gap in accessibility improvement between the two groups is causing differentiated levels of capitalization in nearby housing rent. In this study, a modified repeat sales model was developed to detect the inter-temporal changes of rent gradient from the affected subway stations. Based on the model, the time trends of the rent gradients for the two groups were compared. The estimation results show that the marginal value of a proximity of 100 m to a subway station was increased by about 0.6% during the 12 year period. Furthermore, it was found that the marginal value was increased by 0.8% for the more improved group of network accessibility, while only about 0.2% for the less improved. These findings confirm that network expansion of subway lines benefits subway users in existing subway areas as well as those in new station areas, and that those benefits are capitalized into housing rent.