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Month May 2012

A Request for Readers

1. I’ve been writing for Market Urbanism for about a year now and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Getting your comments and hearing from readers is so rewarding. To provide more of what you’re interested in, I would really appreciate any comments about what topics or types of posts you would like to see covered here. 2. This summer I’m hoping to read two urbanist staples that I’ve read a lot about but am ashamed to say I’ve never actually read: The Economics of Zoning Laws: A Property Rights Approach to American Land Use Controls by William Fischel and Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking. If anyone else would like to tackle these in the next few months or has already read them and would like to contribute to some discussion on them, I’d be happy to set up a Google Group for that.

Walk Score Regression Results

Thanks for the comments on my Walk Score model! Per a few reader requests, here are the full results. I should have thought to provide them initially but didn’t realize there would be interest. Also, I don’t know a good way to put STATA or Excel charts here, so apologies for the screenshots. Here are the results from the OLS model. The 259 datapoints represent all cities with population greater than 100,000 for which there is Walk Score data, except for two or three for which I couldn’t find the MSA data The unemployment is the 5-year January moving average at  2010.   And here are the results of the IV regression, where the instrument is the year that the city was founded. First stage: And the second stage:  

Some Empirical Evidence on Preference for Cities

This semester I took an econometrics class because I got an MA with the bare minimum of quantitative classes. For the class, I wrote a paper asking the question, “Are consumers willing to pay a premium to live in dense urban areas?” It’s easy to see that urban density is correlated with higher housing prices, but this could come from many factors such as people having to live in dense cities to find jobs or to earn higher salaries or from supply restrictions that impact dense cities more than suburbs. As a proxy for cities’ urban qualities, I used Walk Score. Walk Score is based on residential distance to amenities, block length, and road connectivity and ranks cities on a scales of 100. It is designed to test the feasibility of living in a city without a car, but it excludes some factors that are often considered relevant to facilitating pedestrianism, including street width, sidewalk width, and population density. Still, I think Walk Score provides a pretty good measure of a city’s urbanist quality. The correlation between Walk Score and median house price is pretty striking: To test demand for urban living, I wanted to control for the economic factors that drive demand to live in a given city. I tested the impact of Walk Score on median house prices controlling for household income, unemployment, and cost of living. The sample includes 259 cities for which I had Walk Score data and house price data from Kiplinger. The results suggest that for a one-point increase in Walk Score, we can expect a .5% increase in a cities’ median house price, and this result is statistically significant. In another way of measuring the same question (an IV regression using the year the city was founded as the instrument), I found that a one-point […]

Bike Shares and Public Goods

Yesterday, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley announced that seven jurisdictions in Maryland will be receiving grants to start bike share programs. The money for these grants comes from the Maryland Department of Transportation’s Federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality, so these bike shares will be federally subsidized. O’Malley says of the program: “As we celebrate Bike Month, these grants will help bring Bikeshare stations to Maryland,” said Governor O’Malley.  “Bikesharing allows Marylanders an affordable option for short-distance trips as an alternative to public transportation, driving or walking.  By getting out and taking a bike ride, we also learn to enjoy more of Maryland’s natural treasures, help reduce the impact on the land, improve our fitness and well-being, and enhance our quality of life.” The program would be of a similar model to DC’s Capital Bikeshare with capital costs covered primarily with federal grants and some local contributions. I am not much of a bicyclist myself, but I can clearly see the appeal of bike share systems. They provide the convenience of riding a bike to a destination without having to ride it back again, introducing additional flexibility to this mode of transportation. Also, the bikes are better-quality than what many cyclists would buy for themselves. The problem with the politics surrounding bikeshares is that bicycles are not public goods, but elected officials such as O’Malley like to paint them as such. As Adam has previously pointed out, no transportation investment is a public good. The two characteristics that define public goods are nonexcludability and nonrivalrous consumption. Bike shares are perfectly rivalrous and excludable. Because no more than one  person (maybe two people) can ride a bike at a time, bicycles are lower on the public good scale than transit or roads. Greater Greater Washington cites a study that publicly-supported bicycle shares are, shockingly, […]

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