IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/30877.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

More Roads or Public Transit? Insights from Measuring City-Center Accessibility

Author

Listed:
  • Lucas J. Conwell
  • Fabian Eckert
  • Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak

Abstract

We propose a theory-inspired measure of the accessibility of a city's center: the size of the surrounding area from which it can be reached within a specific time. Using publicly available optimal-routing software, we compute these "accessibility zones" for the 109 largest US and European cities, separately for cars and public transit commutes. Compared with European cities, US cities are half as accessible via public transit and twice as accessible via cars. Car accessibility zones are always larger than public transit zones, making US cities more accessible overall. However, US cities' car orientation comes at the cost of less green space, more congestion, and worse health and pollution externalities.

Suggested Citation

  • Lucas J. Conwell & Fabian Eckert & Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, 2023. "More Roads or Public Transit? Insights from Measuring City-Center Accessibility," NBER Working Papers 30877, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30877
    Note: EEE ITI
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w30877.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • Q5 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics
    • R0 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General
    • R4 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Transportation Economics

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30877. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.