We examine the nexus between transportation infrastructure, land-use configurations, auto ownership, travel choices, productivity, and agglomeration, through the metric of accessibility. We develop the method of capacity-constrained accessibility (CCA) to quantify the degree to which capacity constraints influence the effective accessibility contributed by new infrastructure. We examine how high speed rail has reshaped inter-city accessibility patterns in China and enhanced agglomeration economies across regions with both generative and complex redistributive effects. We trace the history of urban rail development in the Boston region and the manner in which it still exerts its influence on today’s residential and travel choices.
-
Measuring policy leakage of Beijing’s car ownership restriction
Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice(2021)In response to severe traffic congestion and air pollution, Beijing introduced a car ownership restriction policy to curb growth in the number of private cars in the city. However, Beijing residents can still purchase and register their cars in neighboring cities and this “leakage” may substantially reduce the policy’s effectiveness. Using city-level data collected from the CEIC China Premium Database, we aim to quantify the spill-over effect: the impact of Beijing’s policy on the growth of private car registrations in neighboring cities. We first deploy a synthetic control method to create a weighted combination of non-treated cities for each treated city. We then employ a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the policy leakage. Our models suggest that the policy resulted in additional 443,000 cars sold in the neighboring cities (within 500 km of Beijing) from 2011-2013, compared to if the policy had not been implemented. 35%-40% of the car growth reduction stipulated by the policy simply spilled over to neighboring cities. The significance of the policy leakage necessitates positioning Beijing’s urban transportation in a broader context and executing regional collaboration.
-
Measuring Policy Leakage of Beijing’s Car Ownership Restriction in Neighboring Cities
Transportation Research Board 99th Annual MeetingWashington, D.C.,(2020)Beijing's license plate lottery policy was originally designed to curb the growth of local vehicle population. However, the avoidance behaviors such as local residents registering their cars in neighboring cities offsets the policy effect. Using the city-level data collected from the CEIC China Premium Database, this study quantitatively identifies the causal effect of the implementation of Beijing's car ownership restriction policy on the growth of private vehicles in neighboring cities. We first use a synthetic control method creating a weighted combination of non-treated cities for each treated city, then employ a difference in difference approach to test the policy leakage effect. The result shows a causal effect of 5.9% on average of Beijing's car ownership restriction policy on the growth of private vehicles in neighboring cities, which amounts to 549 thousand cars. The magnitude of the policy leakage declines by 7.1% every 100 km of driving distance away from Beijing within the 500 km boundary. Our result suggests that as much as 35.4% of the growth in private vehicle population that could have been reduced by the policy simply spilled over to neighboring cities. The significance of the policy leakage necessitates putting Beijing's congestion issues in a broader context and executing regional collaboration. Accordingly, we give some policy suggestions such as parking lots construction, transit system improvement and job- housing co-location.
-
How does public support of transportation policies vary across countries?
Transportation Research Board 99th Annual MeetingWashington, D.C.,(2020)As the world shapes a global agenda to mitigate climate change, national governments are looking to define and build support for sustainable development strategies for the transportation sector. In this international landscape, countries will look to learn from one another, but identifying peer countries for this learning can prove a challenge. In this study, we measure public support for transportation policies and use this as measure of cultural distance for identifying peer countries. We modeled public support for 11 transportation policies in an international sample of 41,932 individuals in 51 countries/regions. Using a model that controls for individual effects, we measure pure “country-level” differences in public policy support. Measuring public support for different transportation policies can help policymakers understand how the public evaluates and envisions the role of government in shaping the current as well as future urban transport system, and to anticipate difficulties of implementing certain types of policies due to public resistance. In general, we find the highest public support for a given policy appears in countries that have not yet seen significant investment in the target infrastructure or service. We show that considering public support of transportation policies gives a different perspective than traditional indicators of economic development or motorization level, helping policymakers understand what the public wants and how they might build public support for new transportation policies. Finally, we present a clustering framework that goes beyond development status and geographical adjacency to help identify peer countries for policy learning.
-
Policies for autonomy: How American cities envision regulating automated vehicles
Urban Science(2020)Local governments play an important role in structuring urban transportation through street design, zoning, and shared jurisdiction over ride-hailing, transit, and road pricing. While cities can harness these powers to steer planning outcomes, there is little research about what local officials think about regulatory changes related to autonomous vehicles (AV). We compile key AV-related policies recommended by scholars but rarely implemented, and conduct a survey of municipal officials throughout the United States, exploring their personal support and perceptions of bureaucratic capacity, legal limits, and political backing for each policy. This paper finds broad personal support for regulations related to right-of-way, equity, and land use, such as for increasing pedestrian space, expanding access for low-income people, and reducing sprawl. However, officials emphasized uncertain bureaucratic and legal capacity for city intervention outside of these areas, reaffirming limited local power in the federal system. Only a minority expected political support for any policy. Greater population size and more liberal resident political ideologies are strongly associated with personal and political support for many policies. Local population growth is correlated with greater capacity to undertake policies. This work contributes to the growing literature on transportation governance in the context of technological uncertainty.
-
What Drives the Increasing Costs of Transit Operations? The Implications of Labor Productivity, Contracting Out, and Unionization
Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting(2017)Unit costs measured as operating costs per vehicle mile in the public transit sector have increased significantly above the inflation rate in recent decades in the United States, regardless of mode and location. This paper examines the impact of (lack of) productivity growth, union bargaining power, and contracting out on cost escalation. We draw from a 17-year (1997-2014) and 438-agency panel of 8,276 observations by mode (bus vs. rail) and type of operations (directly operated by the agency vs. contracted out). We have three main findings: First, the unit cost increase in public transit sector is worse than what the Buamol disease predicts—i.e. more than the growth rate that would occur if transit wage rate increases were equal to those prevailing elsewhere in the economy. Second Contracting out tends to reduce unit costs, suggesting that the costs savings from private operations are partly explained by lower wages to workers. However, while overall costs are lower in contracted services, cost escalation in medium and large private bus operators is no different than in large public transit operators, and the cost savings are larger when the transit agency also directly operates a share of the overall transit service. Third, unique transit labor laws are a likely driver of the unit cost growth above inflation. Overall, these factors reflect inherent characteristics of the transit sector, such as the nature of low productivity growth and union bargaining power related to the need for public subsidy. They drive increase in both transit fares and public subsidy at rates higher than inflation, and play an important role in the deterioration of transit agencies’ financial sustainability.
-
This paper studies the impacts of Madrid-Seville High-Speed Rail (HSR) on land-cover change in the five HSR connected cities – Madrid, Ciudad Real, Puertollano, Cordoba, and Seville. The analysis period ranges from 1991 to 2006. The study finds that, in the Madrid-Seville region, the land development process concentrates mostly toward the two largest cities, Madrid and Seville, while other smaller HSR served cities are also benefited. The process of land development in each city varies largely. HSR contributes more to Ciudad Real and Cordoba than to Puertollano, with booming urban development in the former two cities. To study the accessibility impacts of HSR, binary discrete choice models are adopted. The results suggest that, the land development in smaller cities can be mainly explained by the improvement of regional accessibility and population growth. However, to model the urban development process in Madrid and Seville, the inputs with only accessibility and population are not sufficient.
-
Mapping transit accessibility: Possibilities for public participation
Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice(2017)The value of accessibility concepts is well-established in transportation literature, but so is the low adoption of accessibility-based instruments by practitioners. Based on the premise that leveraging accessibility concepts to address public involvement challenges could promote their adoption in planning practice, this research investigates mechanisms to promote social learning among participants in public workshops. Potential mechanisms of learning include specific tool-based interactions and how such interactions reinforce structures of learning such as alignment and imagination. This paper details iterative testing of these mechanisms with a tool called CoAXs (short for Collaborative ACCESSibility-based stakeholder engagement system), through focus groups and exploratory workshops. A mixed-methods analysis of the workshops supports the expectation that alignment and imagination correlate positively with social learning, as measured by reported learning and dialog quality. Specific interactions with the accessibility-based features of CoAXs in turn correlate positively with alignment and imagination, at individual and group levels of analysis. These findings, while not robustly generalizable, suggest that effective targeted stakeholder engagement for public transport can be structured around collaborative accessibility mapping. Adoption for broader public participation requires further development, especially the incorporation of actual day-to-day experiences such as unreliable operations.
-
Worse than Baumol’s disease: The implications of labor productivity, contracting out, and unionization on transit operation costs
Transport Policy61,(2017)Unit costs measured as bus operating costs per vehicle mile have increased considerably above the inflation rate in recent decades in most transit agencies in the United States. This paper examines the impact of (lack of) productivity growth, union bargaining power, and contracting out on cost escalation. We draw from a 17-year (1997–2014) and a 415-bus transit agency panel with 5780 observations by type of operation (directly operated by the agency or contracted out). We have three main findings: first, the unit cost increase in the transit sector is far worse than what economic theory predicts for industries with low productivity growth. Second, contracting out tends to reduce unit costs, and the results suggest that the costs savings from private operations can be only partly explained by lower wages in the private sector. Interestingly, we find that the cost savings from contracting out are larger when the transit agency also directly operates part of the total transit service. However, while overall unit costs are lower in contracted services, cost growth in large private bus operators is no different than cost growth in large public transit operators. Third, unique transit labor laws that lead to union bargaining power are a likely driver of the unit cost growth above inflation. Overall, these factors reflect inherent characteristics of the bus transit sector, such as the nature of low productivity growth and union legislative power related to the need for public subsidy. They drive increases in both transit fares and public subsidy at rates higher than inflation, and play an important role in the deterioration of transit agencies’ financial sustainability.
-
Ghosts in the Machine: The Influence of Proximity to Past Rail on Current Auto Ownership
95th Transportation Research Board Annual MeetingWashington, D.C.,(2016)The extent to which traveler preferences and built environment characteristics influence travel behavior are difficult to disentangle because they are so intricately tied to the residential location decision. This paper treats these two issues jointly by focusing on the spatial location of past rail infrastructure in different representative eras as an indicator that is currently omitted from auto ownership models. Past rail has influenced the current built environment, and is likely related to household preferences for automobility. We find that shorter distances to past rail have lower levels of auto ownership in Boston area. This finding is supported by models incorporating instrumental variables (IV) to address the endogeneity issue. The results are robust to the controls of demographic and current BE variables used and the specification of the spatial structure of the model. The implication is that transportation infrastructure has lasting effects on travel behavior beyond the immediate use value. Excluding these long-term effects in current models can skew decision-making.
-
Cross-City Comparison: Impacts of Madrid-Seville High-Speed Rail on Population Growth
95th Transportation Research Board Annual MeetingWashington, D.C.,(2016)This paper studies and compares the impacts of Madrid-Seville High-Speed Rail (HSR) on population growth in the five cities served by this line—Madrid, Ciudad Real, Puertollano, Córdoba, and Seville. The analysis period ranges from 1990 to 2006. The comparative analysis finds that the impacts of HSR largely differ. The association between the opening of HSR and population growth in Ciudad Real is observable; but the relationship is not clear in other station inner buffer areas. To study the impacts of HSR on population growth in each station area, accessibility-based spatial autoregressive models are adopted. The estimates suggest that HSR contributes to Ciudad Real with a relevant population increase, whereas it seldom benefits Puertollano. As the two largest cities along the HSR line, the improvement of accessibility leads to population growth in central Madrid. On the contrary, in Seville, instead of moving towards the central area, with easier access to suburban areas and to other cities, people are likely to move out from the city center. In Cordoba, population growth is not directly influenced by the improved accessibility, but is significantly correlated to the new residential land development, as the urban renovation project affiliated to HSR.
-
This paper proposes an enhanced measure of accessibility that explicitly considers circumstances in which the capacity of the transport infrastructure is limited. Under these circumstances, passengers may suffer longer waiting times, resulting in the delay or cancellation of trips. Without considering capacity constraints, the standard measure overestimates the accessibility contribution of transport infrastructure. We estimate the expected waiting time and the probability of forgoing trips based on the M/GB/1 type of queuing and discrete-event simulation, and formally incorporate the impacts of capacity constraints into a new measure: Capacity Constrained Accessibility (CCA). To illustrate the differences between CCA and standard measures of accessibility, this paper estimates the accessibility change in the Beijing–Tianjin corridor due to the Beijing–Tianjin Intercity High-Speed Railway (BTIHSR). We simulate and compare the CCA and standard measures in five queuing scenarios with varying demand patterns and service headway assumptions. The results show that 1) under low system loads condition, CCA is compatible with and absorbs the standard measure as a special case; 2) when demand increases and approaches capacity, CCA declines significantly; in two quasi-real scenarios, the standard measure overestimates the accessibility improvement by 14~30% relative to the CCA; and 3) under the scenario with very high demand and an unreliable timetable, the CCA is almost reduced to the pre-BTIHSR level. Because the new CCA measure effectively incorporates the impact of capacity constraints, it is responsive to different arrival rules, service distributions, and system loads, and therefore provides a more realistic representation of accessibility change than the standard measure.
-
Agglomeration and Diversification: Bi-Level Analysis of 15-Years’ Impacts of Madrid-Seville High-Speed Rail
Transportation Research Board 94th Annual MeetingWashington, D.C.,(2015)This paper studies the impacts of Madrid-Seville High-Speed Rail (HSR) on population growth and land cover change in the five HSR connected cities – Madrid, Ciudad Real, Puertollano, Cordoba, and Seville – at both regional and local level. The analysis period ranges from 1991 to 2006. The study finds that, at regional level, the population growth and land development process concentrate mostly towards the two largest cities, Madrid and Seville, while other smaller HSR served cities are also benefited by HSR. At local level, the impacts of HSR are more diverse. The process of population redistribution and land development in each city varies largely. Among all evidences, HSR contributes the most to Ciudad Real, with booming population increases and urban development. In addition, younger people are also attracted to reside in this area. To study the accessibility impacts of HSR on the development of new urban areas in each HSR city, binary probit models incorporating the change of accessibility, population, and neighborhood situations are adopted. The results suggest that, the land development in smaller cities can be majorly ascribed to the improvement of regional accessibility and population growth. However, to explain the urban development process in Madrid and Seville, the inputs with only accessibility and population are not sufficient.
-
Hysteresis and Urban Rail: The Effects of Past Urban Rail on Current Residential and Travel Choices
European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research15,(2015)Cities are endowed with and accumulate natural and constructed assets based on their unique histories, which in turn define the choice set of the present. But, common practice is that current behaviour can be described without reference to past circumstances. This work departs from that practice by examining the effects of historical urban rail on current residential location and travel behaviour, from the era of horsecars (1865) and streetcars (1925) to the present in Boston. It uses tract level data to explore the hysteretical effects of past access to rail—the extent to which the urban system retains the impacts of rail even when it no longer exists.
Current density and travel behaviour are measurably influenced by past access to rail. These findings are robust to a series of alternate causal, functional, and spatial specifications. The built environment and demographic patterns are found to be the strongest mechanisms for these persistent effects. Past access to rail has shaped the city, and that shape has, in turn, affected travel behaviour. For density and auto ownership there is also a residual measurable effect of past access unexplained by the built environment or demographic patterns.
This research shows that past rail access continues to reverberate in current residential location and travel behaviour. These findings of hysteresis add to an understanding of the long-term impacts of rail infrastructure, and suggest that if higher density and lower levels of auto ownership are desirable, policymakers should focus on reuse of areas that were built around rail. -
Ghosts in the Machine: The Influence of Historical Rail on Current Auto Ownership
Journal of Planning Education and Research(Submitted)This paper focuses on the impact of historical rail infrastructure—even after it no longer exists—on current auto ownership in the Boston area. We find that zones with shorter distances to historical rail infrastructure have lower levels of auto ownership. The results are robust to controls for current rail infrastructure, built environment, and demographic variation, as well as to instrumental variables that control for endogeneity. They imply that transportation infrastructure has lasting effects on travel behavior. Excluding these long-term effects in current models can skew decision-making.
TEAM Members
-
Yu Shen
Assistant Professor at Tongji Univ. -
Anson Stewart
Deputy Director; Research Scientist -
Jinhua Zhao
Professor of Cities and Transportation