Interest in rail transit and walkable built environments has increased in recent years as North American cities have invested large sums on these interventions and scholars have undertaken a vast research program to examine their impact on travel behavior, development, and property values. The economic impact of these “active” transportation interventions is particularly important to understand, given their large fixed cost and the desire of policy-makers to use them as economic development and urban revitalization tools. At the same time, new business creation is an important engine of sustainable local development, necessitating a more detailed understanding of the direct links between infrastructure investment and new business creation. To better understand this process, this dissertation examines the economic impact of rail transit systems and walkable built environments using several quantitative approaches, including quasi-experimental time series regression, spatial econometric approaches, and hierarchical linear modeling. The first chapter evaluates the impact of Phoenix’s light rail system, which opened in 2008, on new firm formation in specific industries. Findings show that the transit adjacency is worth an 88% increase in knowledge sector new starts, a 40% increase in service sector new starts, and a 28% increase in retail new starts at the time the system opened, when compared with automobile-accessible control areas. However, the light rail also appears to suffer from a ‘novelty factor’ – after the initial increase in new establishment activity in adjacent block groups, the effect diminishes at the rate of 8%, 6%, and 7% per year, respectively. The results also provide insight into the spatial extent of light rail impacts to new business formation, with areas 1 mile from stations observing 21% fewer retail new business starts and 12% fewer knowledge sector new starts than areas within 1⁄4-mile of stations.The second chapter evaluates the relationship between transit station proximity and new business creation in five regions with varying levels of maturity in rail transit development and/or entrepreneurial ecosystems – Boston, San Jose, Austin, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. It tests a variety of spatial econometric models to find the best specification and compares the results to the kinds of non-spatial models currently used in the literature. This provides a better understanding of the role of various forms of spatial dependence in the transit—new business creation relationship and shows that existing models may overstate the impact of transit on new business creation. In addition, the paper teases out differences between regions, rail modes, and business types that can be usefully applied to a variety of urban contexts.Finally, the third chapter examines the importance of place-making in economic development by evaluating the relationship between specific urban design features – based on Jacobs’ “four generators of diversity” (1961) and Ewing and Cervero’s “Five-D’s” (2010) – and business sales volume using a hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) framework in Phoenix and Boston. The results indicate that specific features of walkable built environments are positively associated with business performance. However, the relationship between walkable built environments and business performance varies considerably depending on the type of business and city-level context being studied, indicating that significant nuance must be used when considering place-based economic interventions.
Read
