Transit oriented development in Bengaluru could lead to additional $64 Million per year

A new paper in the Journal of Development Economics by Liming Chen, Rana Hasan, Yi Jiang, and Andrii Parkhomenko estimates the welfare gains of Transit Oriented Development in Bengaluru. The Bengaluru metro or the Namma metro is around 170Km long including the planned sections. Bengaluru has low building heights and the paper’s counterfactual depends on relaxing FSI/FAR from their current level to 2 (only 2!) around 500 meters of the metro line. The paper finds “The complementarity between TOD and the metro unlocks additional gains equivalent to about $64 million per year or one-half of annual operating costs of the metro system.” Paper reference:Chen, L., Hasan, R., Jiang, Y., & Parkhomenko, A. (2024). Faster, taller, better: Transit improvements and land use policies. Journal of Development Economics, 103322.