Urban policy and traffic patterns can influence how people eat, as public transportation improvements can alter the transaction costs associated with choosing unique food outlets. Despite the history of research on infrastructure improvements, few studies have explored these linkages between public transportation investment and consumer food choices, creating a research gap in this area. This study uses a novel dataset to investigate how U.S. transportation investments alter foot traffic patterns in food-away-from-home retail establishments, specifically looking at restaurants and other eating places. We hypothesize that new public transportation reduces consumer transaction costs and leads to an increase in observed demand, as well to a choice substitution effect between different categories of food establishments. To test this hypothesis, we match three Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant awardees to SafeGraph foot traffic data in the communities surrounding the awarded projects. Our awardees of interest are the Milwaukee Hop (streetcar), the Omaha Rapid Bus Transit (BRT), and the Virginia Pulse (BRT), three public transportation systems representing a diverse set of cities and regions. Using two-way fixed effects models, we estimate the effects of each public transportation investment on local foot traffic at eating places. Of particular interest is how the new infrastructure investments changed foot traffic outcomes in full and limited-service establishments differently. We then compare our results to a placebo city (Savannah, Georgia) as a robustness test. Estimates vary substantially by city. Contrary to our hypothesis, we fail to find a positive effect on attendance of these infrastructure investments in two of the three treated cities. In some cases, the infrastructure investments might have actually decreased foot traffic in the investment region. We also fail to confirm our choice substitution effect hypothesis between full-service and limited-service restaurants, finding counter-intuitive outcomes in one of the three cities studied as well as in our Placebo test city. These findings suggest that public infrastructure projects are not a panacea, as they don’t translate into immediate spillover effects to the food system. Policymakers should consider the underlying economic geography of the projects they plan to undertake to better understand their potential impact on consumer patterns around food establishments.
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