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on Transport Economics |
| By: | Guerra, Erick Strom |
| Abstract: | Mexico City is a suburban metropolis, yet most of its suburbs would be unfamiliar to urbanists accustomed to thinking about US metropolitan regions. Mexico City’s suburbs are densely populated—not thinly settled—and its residents rely primarily on informal transit rather than privately-owned automobiles for their daily transportation. These types of dense and transit-dependent suburbs have emerged as the fastest-growing form of human settlement in cities throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Wealthier and at a later stage in its economic development than other developing-world metropolises, Mexico City is a compelling place to investigate the effects of rising incomes, increased car ownership, and transit investments in the dense, peripheral areas that have grown rapidly around informal transit in the past decades, and is a bellwether for cities like Dakar, Cairo, Lima, and Jakarta. I begin this dissertation with a historical overview of the demographic, economic, and political trends that have helped shape existing urban form, transportation infrastructure, and travel behavior in Mexico City. Despite an uptick in car ownership and use, most households—both urban and suburban—continue to rely on public transportation. Furthermore, suburban Mexico City has lower rates of car ownership and use than its central areas. In subsequent chapters, I frame, pose, and investigate three interrelated questions about Mexico City’s evolving suburban landscape, the nature of households’ travel decisions, and the relationship between the built environment and travel behavior. Together, these inquiries tell a story that differs significantly from narratives about US suburbs, and provide insight into the future transportation needs and likely effects of land and transportation policy in these communities and others like them in Mexico and throughout the developing world. First, how has the influence of the built environment on travel behavior changed as more households have moved into the suburbs and aggregate car use has increased? Using two large metropolitan household travel surveys from 1994 and 2007, I model two related-but-distinct household travel decisions: whether to drive on an average weekday, and if so, how far to drive. After controlling for income and other household attributes, I find that the influence of population and job density on whether a household undertakes any daily car trips is strong and has increased marginally over time. By contrast, high job and population densities have a much smaller influence on the total distance of weekday car travel that a household generates. For the subset of households whose members drive on a given weekday, job and population densities have no statistical effect at all. Contrary to expectations, a household’s distance from the urban center is strongly correlated with a lower probability of driving, even after controlling for income. This effect, however, appears to be diminishing over time, and when members of a household drive, they drive significantly more if they live farther from the urban center. The combination of informal transit, public buses, and the Metro has provided sufficient transit service to constrain car use in the densely populated suburban environments of Mexico City. Once suburban residents drive, however, they tend to drive a lot regardless of transit or the features of the built environment. Second, how much are the recent trends of increased suburbanization, rising car-ownership, and the proliferation of massive commercially-built peripheral housing developments interrelated? To investigate this question, I first disentangle urban growth and car ownership trends by geographic area. The fastest-growing areas tend to be poorer and have had a much smaller impact on the size of the metropolitan car fleet than wealthier, more established neighborhoods in the center and western half of the metropolis. I then zoom in to examine several recent commercial housing developments. These developments, supported by publicly-subsidized mortgages, contain thousands of densely-packed, small, and modestly-priced housing units. Their residents remain highly reliant on public transportation, particularly informal transit, and the neighborhoods become less homogenous over time as homeowners convert units and parking spaces to shops and offices. Finally, I use the 2007 household travel survey to model households’ intertwined decisions of where to live and whether to own a car. As expected, wealthier and smaller households are more likely to purchase vehicles. However, they prefer to live in more central areas where households with cars tend to drive shorter distances. If housing policy and production cannot adapt to provide more centrally-located housing, growing incomes will tend to increase car ownership but concentrate more of it in areas where car-owning households drive much farther. Third, how has the Metro’s Line B, one of the first and only suburban high-capacity transit investments, influenced local and regional travel behavior and land use? To explore this question, I compare travel behavior and land use measures at six geographic scales, including the investment’s immediate catchment area, across two time periods: six years before and seven years after the investment opened. Line B, which opened in stages in 1999 and 2000, significantly expanded Metro coverage into the densely populated and fast-growing suburban municipality of Ecatepec. While the investment sparked a significant increase in local Metro use, most of this increase came from people relying on informal transit, rather than cars. While this shift reduced transit fares and increased transit speeds for local residents, it also increased government subsidies for the Metro and had no apparent effect on road speeds. Furthermore, the Metro remains highly dependent on informal transit to provide feeder service even within Ecatepec. In terms of land use, the investment increased density around the stations but appears to have had little to no effect on downtown commercial development, where it might have been expected to have a significant influence. In short, the effects of Line B demonstrate much of the promise and problem with expanding high capacity transit service into the suburbs. Ridership is likely to be high, but so too will be the costs and subsidies, while the effects on car ownership and urban form are likely to be modest. Individually, each chapter contributes to a specific body of transportation and planning literature drawn from the US as well as developing countries. Collectively, they point to connection between land use and transportation in Mexico City that is different from the 3 connection in US and other rich-world cities. In particular, there is a physical disconnect between the generally suburban homes of transit users and the generally central location of high-capacity public transit. Addressing this disconnect by shifting housing production from the periphery to the center or by expanding high-capacity transit to the periphery would require significant amounts of time and public subsidy. Thus, contemporary policies to reduce car use or increase accessibility for the poor in the short and medium term would do well to focus on improving the flexible, medium-capacity informal transit around which the city’s dense and transit-dependent suburbs have grown and continue to grow. |
| Keywords: | City/Urban, Community and Regional Planning |
| Date: | 2013–05–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdl:uctcwp:qt88t7k9p5&r=tre |
| By: | Fosgerau, Mogens; Jensen, Thomas C. |
| Abstract: | This paper analyses a tax reform, explicitly conceived by policy makers to be climate-friendly, that partly replaces a high vehicle registration tax by road user charging and allows for differentiation of the remaining registration tax by fuel efficiency. A microeconomic framework is proposed to analyse such a reform. For the case of Denmark, the analysis shows that the reform is likely to yield a significant and robust welfare gain. However, it seems not unlikely that CO2 emissions from passenger cars may increase as a result of the reform. |
| Keywords: | Congestion; Road user charging; Tax reform; CO2; Welfare economics; Registration tax |
| JEL: | H2 R41 |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:42264&r=tre |
| By: | Mark R. Jacobsen; Arthur A. van Benthem |
| Abstract: | We estimate the sensitivity of scrap decisions to changes in used car values – the "scrap elasticity" – and show how it influences used car fleets under policies aimed at reducing gasoline use. Large scrap elasticities will tend to produce emissions leakage under efficiency standards as the longevity of used vehicles is increased, a process known as the Gruenspecht effect. To explore the magnitude of this leakage we assemble a novel dataset of U.S. used vehicle registrations and prices, which we relate through time via differential effects in gasoline cost: A gasoline price increase or decrease of $1 alters the number of fuel-efficient vs. fuel-inefficient vehicles scrapped by 18%. These relationships allow us to provide what we believe are the first estimates of the scrap elasticity itself, which we find to be about -0.7. When applied in a model of fuel economy standards, the elasticities we estimate suggest that 13-23% of the expected fuel savings will leak away through the used vehicle market. This considerably reduces the cost-effectiveness of the standard, rivaling or exceeding the importance of the often-cited mileage "rebound" effect. |
| JEL: | H23 Q52 Q58 |
| Date: | 2013–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19055&r=tre |
| By: | Morrissey, Karyn; O’Donoghue, Cathal |
| Abstract: | Economically, Ireland depends heavily upon its shipping sector. However, structural changes arising from the globalisation of shipping fleets and the recent global recession has resulted in a decline in Europe’s shipping sector. Acknowledging the need for direct measures to halt this decline the Irish government introduced a range of policies aimed at developing a maritime transportation cluster in Ireland. Research has indicated that industrial clusters are important for the creation of economic value at the national, regional and sectoral level. Disaggregating the 2007 Input-Output table to include ten additional marine based sectors, this paper examines the potential for developing a maritime transportation cluster given the current characteristics of the sector. The analysis found that given the strength of the maritime transportation linkages with the broader economy, including its intermediate input role in a number of key economic sectors, there is a clear rationale for the development of a cluster for the sector. |
| Keywords: | Shipping, industrial clusters, Ireland, Environmental Economics and Policy, |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:semrui:148836&r=tre |
| By: | Åslund, Olof (IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy); Engdahl, Mattias (Department of Economics, Uppsala University) |
| Abstract: | We study the labor market impact of opening borders to low-wage countries. The analysis exploits time and regional variation provided by the 2004 EU enlargement in combination with transport links to Sweden from the new member states. The results suggest an adverse impact on earnings of present workers in the order of 1 percent in areas close to pre-existing ferry lines. The effects are present in most segments of the labor market but tend to be greater in groups with weaker positions. The impact is also clearer in industries which have received more workers from the new member states, and for which across-the-border work is likely to be more common. There is no robust evidence on an impact on employment or wages. At least part of the effects is likely due to channels other than the ones typically considered in the literature. |
| Keywords: | Migration policy; immigration; labor market outcomes |
| JEL: | J16 J31 J61 |
| Date: | 2013–05–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2013_011&r=tre |
| By: | Eva Gutierrez Puigarnau; Jos N. van Ommeren (VU) |
| Abstract: | One of the classic predictions of urban economic theory is that high-income and low-income households choose different residential locations and therefore, conditional on workplace location, have different commuting patterns. According to theory, the effect of household income on commuting distance may be positive or negative. Empirical tests of this effect are not standard, due to reverse causation and lack of good control variables. To address reverse causation, estimates of household income on commuting distance are derived using changes in distance through residential moves keeping workplace location constant. Our results show that the (long-run) income elasticity of distance is non-negative and around 0.14 for dual wage-earners. |
| JEL: | D1 J3 R2 |
| Date: | 2013–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpb:discus:244&r=tre |
| By: | Richard Darbéra (LATTS - Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Sociétés - Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée (UPEMLV) - Ecole des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS : UMR8134) |
| Abstract: | Le 10 janvier dernier la circulation dans les grandes villes de France a été paralysée par les opérations escargot des taxis. Ils manifestaient contre le projet de l'État d'expérimenter dans trois régions des appels d'offres pour le transport de malades assis. Dans son blog du journal Le Monde, Olivier Razemon titrait son article : " la France, cet étrange pays où le taxi fait l'ambulancier ". En fait, il n'y a rien d'étrange à ce que les taxis transportent des malades. Dans la plupart des pays d'Europe, par économie, les services de santé font en effet appel à des taxis quand les ambulances ne sont pas indispensables. L'étrangeté de la situation française réside non pas dans le recours à des taxis mais dans le fait de leur attribuer ces marchés publics considérables (plus d'un milliard d'euros) sans concurrence et sans véritable contrôle. Nous avons décrit ce système coûteux dans le n°472 de Transports. Si procéder à des appels d'offres apparaît comme une condition nécessaire pour rationaliser le système, ce n'est pas une condition suffisante. Des appels d'offres mal conçus qui, implicitement, favoriseraient de grandes entreprises de transport au détriment des taxis pourraient se révéler rapidement (mais trop tard) contre-productifs. En mars 2011, l'Institut pour la Ville en Mouvement (IVM) a organisé un séminaire sur les contrats de service public assurés par les taxis dans les pays d'Europe, réunissant une quinzaine d'experts venus d'Irlande, du Royaume-Uni, des Pays-Bas, de Suède, de Norvège, du Danemark, et de France. Son objet était de comprendre comment les organismes qui financent ces différents services de transport choisissent les prestataires qui vont les assurer, et comment les taxis s'organisent pour répondre à ces demandes et pour faire face a des éventuels concurrents venus d'autres secteurs des transports. À la suite de ce séminaire des missions de recherche ont été conduites aux Pays-Bas au Danemark et en Suède. Cet article fait le point des acquis de cet effort de recherche. |
| Keywords: | Taxi; transport à la demande; appels d'offres; régulation |
| Date: | 2013–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00821777&r=tre |
| By: | Hynes, Stephen; Greene, William |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we examine heterogeneity in the trip preferences of recreationists by applying a random parameters negative binomial model and a latent class negative binomial model to a panel data set of beach users at a site on the west coast of Ireland. This is the first such attempt in the literature to account for heterogeneity with respect to the impact of the chosen explanatory variables in contingent behaviour travel cost models of demand where the researcher also must account for the fact that the sample data has been collected on-site. The analysis also develops individual consumer surplus estimates and finds that estimates are systematically affected by both the random parameter and latent class specifications. There is also evidence that accounting for individual heterogeneity improves the statistical fit of the models and provides a more informative description of the drivers of recreationalist trip behaviour. |
| Keywords: | Contingent behaviour, travel cost, count data, heterogeneity, latent class, random parameter, endogenous stratification, truncation, negative binomial, consumer surplus, Environmental Economics and Policy, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:semrui:148834&r=tre |