The Impact of Access to Public Transportation on Residential Property Value: A Comparative Analysis of American Cities
By Moses Snow Wayne
This paper develops a consistent model for analyzing the impact of access to public transportation on property value applied to the four cities of Atlanta, Boston, New York, and San Francisco. This study finds a negative relationship between increasing distance to public transit and property value. Additionally, the elicited effects in each city generally align with geographic features and the degree to which a city is monocentric. This study also demonstrates the salience of using actual map-generated distances as proximity measures and characteristics of public
transit systems in modeling the relationship between public transportation and residential property value.
Advisors: Dr. Patrick Bayer and Kent Kimbrough | JEL Codes: C12, R14, R30, R41
The Toll of Commuting: The Effects of Commute Time on Well-Being
By M. Thomas Marshall Jr.
When deciding on housing location, people theoretically optimize for the best location given their commute time, housing cost, income, as well as other factors. Stutzer and Frey (2008) suggest that this is not true in some nations, such as in their investigation of Germany, with their results showing that the cost of an average commute is equivalent to 35.4% of the average income. This paper investigates the impact of commute time on the well-being of individuals in the United States, correcting for various other factors that determine housing choice such as race,
age, and whether they have a child living at home. The results of this study are clearly that the relationship found between commuting time and well-being cannot be proven to be statistically significant from zero, so there is not any evidence against optimization.
Advisor: Kent Kimbrough | JEL Codes: D12, D61, R31, R41
BIDDING FOR PARKING: The Impact of University Affiliation on Predicting Bid Values in Dutch Auctions of On-Campus Parking Permits
By Grant Kelly
Parking is often underpriced and expanding its capacity is expensive; universities need a better way of reducing congestion outside of building costly parking garages. Demand based pricing mechanisms, such as auctions, offer a possible solution to the problem by promising to reduce parking at peak times. However, faculty, students, and staff at universities have systematically different parking needs, leading to different parking valuations. In this study, I determine the impact university affiliation has on predicting bid values cast in three Dutch Auctions of on-campus parking permits sold at Chapman University in Fall 2010. Using clustering techniques crosschecked with university demographic information to detect affiliation groups, I ran a log-linear regression, finding that university affiliation had a larger effect on bid amount than on lot location and fraction of auction duration. Generally, faculty were predicted to have higher bids whereas students were predicted to have lower bids.
Advisor: Alison Hagy, Allan Collard-Wexler, Kent Kimbrough | JEL Codes: C38, C57, D44, R4, R49 | Tagged: Auctions, Parking, University Parking, Bidder Affiliation, Dutch Auction, Clustering
The Impact of Suburbanization on Poverty Concentration: Using Transportation Networks to Predict the Spatial Distribution of Poverty
By Winston Riddick
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of concentrated poverty, a phenomenon where socioeconomically deprived groups are heavily concentrated in particular neighborhoods in a metropolitan area. Drawing on Land Use Theory and the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis, I develop a theory that identifies suburbanization as a principal cause of poverty concentration. Using interstate highway expansion as a source of exogenous variation in suburbanization rates, I evaluate this relationship in 240 U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) from 1960-1990, with concentrated poverty measured at the tract level. Panel regressions with MSA Fixed Effects find a positive and significant relationship between highway expansion and increased poverty concentration under a variety of specifications, including alternative measures of highways and an instrumented measure of urban population decline.
Advisor: Charles Becker, Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: I30, J61, R13, R40 | Tagged: Highways, Poverty Concentration, Spatial Mismatch, Suburbanization, Transportation Networks
High Occupancy Toll Lines: Do They Reduce Congestion?
By David Wang
In 2009, according to data from the American Community Survey, ninety percent of workers in the U.S. used a privately owned vehicle when commuting. For an average commuter, the annual traffic delay in urban areas has increased from below fifteen hours in 1982 to more than thirty-five hours in 2007 (Winston, 2013). Furthermore, the annual cost of congestion, including travel delays and fuel expenditures, exceeds $100 billion a year (Winston, 2013). From a welfare standpoint, these travel delays cause a total welfare cost of $45 billion a year (Langer, Winston, & Baum-Snow, 2008). Governments have considered a variety of solutions to combat this congestion, the most prevalent being high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes and congestion pricing, including high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes.
The federal government heavily encouraged the construction of HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes, passing the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991. It was thought that the speed differential between HOV lanes and general-purpose (GP) lanes would lead drivers to switch to carpools, thereby reducing the number of vehicles on the roads and the amount of congestion. However, in practice, HOV lanes have not been very successful and single occupancy vehicle (SOV) users often complain about underutilized HOV lanes. These observations mirror transportation researchers’ criticisms of the ineffectiveness of HOV lanes in reducing congestion. Dahlgren (1998) argues that adding a GP lane to existing highways is more effective at lowering delay costs than adding an HOV lane.
Another strategy, congestion pricing, involves placing a price on using roadways to offset the social cost arising from such use. Under Vickrey’s theory, the charges should match the marginal social cost of each trip as closely as possible (Vickrey, 1963). In a standard highway with only GP lanes, the personal cost of traveling, in the form of the value of time, often does not equal the social cost imposed on other commuters on the highway. This scenario gives rise to a mismatch in incentives and to a tragedy of the commons. In actual application, few tolling schemes for congestion pricing exist. Since technology has made collecting tolls cheaper, the main challenge now is public resistance. Current implementations of congestion pricing include Singapore’s Electronic Road Pricing system and U.S. HOT lanes.
High occupancy toll (HOT) lanes have potential as a politically feasible policy to improve utilization of HOV lanes and generate revenue. HOT lanes give solo drivers the option to pay a toll for use of HOV lanes. The HOT lanes help address several issues, for example balancing the load and reducing congestion by shifting some solo drivers from GP lanes to HOV lanes, giving drivers the option of traveling on less congested lanes, and generating revenue for highway operators (Poole & Orski, 2000). Many studies of HOT lanes use California State Route 91 as an example of a HOT highway and seek to model any welfare gains from its implementation (Liu & McDonald, 1998; Small & Yan, 2001). Opened in 1995, the SR-91 serves as a good case study because it was one of the first HOT operations in the U.S. The literature also explores the distributional effects of congestion pricing over the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, looking at a network of roads rather than a single one (Safirova et al., 2004). They emphasize that much of the benefit from HOT lanes comes from undoing the inefficiency created by existing HOV lanes. Safirova et al.’s study is one of few empirical ones in the literature. Nevertheless, theoretical models, such as that by Konishi and Mun (2010), could be used as a basis for future empirical studies. The economics literature covers welfare gains, but does not address empirically how the congestion reduction from HOV and HOT lanes has changed over time. Although theory may predict welfare gains in the short term, it is unclear what the long run effects may be. In this paper, we seek to examine the short-run effects of the conversion of HOV to HOT lanes on highway congestion.
Advisor: Charles Becker, Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: R41, R48 | Tagged: Congestion Pricing, HOT lanes, HOV lanes, Tolls, Transportation economics
