Implementing a Commuting Market Access Model to the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area
Open Access
- Author:
- Gupte, Atharv
- Area of Honors:
- Mathematics
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Ruilin Zhou, Thesis Supervisor
Mark Levi, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- economics
math
statistics
transportation
geography
schools
education
real estate
residential
commercial - Abstract:
- Scholars, policymakers, and real estate developers all agree that constructing new public transportation systems results in increased economic growth and labor productivity. Several empirical models have been constructed that reliably conclude specific economic and social effects that changes in commuting patterns provide. However, the vast majority of these models have only been applied to cities in developing economies, where the construction of transit systems has recently been much greater than in developed economies such as the United States. This has led to considerable uncertainty to the degree of relocation resulting from the construction of new rail or bus lines. Such uncertainty has stalled several transit and urban development proposals. This paper discusses a commuter market access (CMA) model developed for Bogotá, Colombia. The Bogotá model reliably explains various economic effects of its Transmilenio transit system, which drastically changed commuting patterns across the city. This study then applies the Bogotá model to neighborhoods in the Washington, DC area, a much higher income region. The reliability of this model on various geoeconomic developments in the DC region is then analyzed, and compared to that of Bogotá. In the end, the Bogotá model’s merits can be extended to analyze firm relocation preferences in developed economies, but household relocation in such economies is much more nuanced and remains not fully explained.