Subways and Urban Growth: Evidence from Earth
This paper investigates the relationship between the extent of a city’s subway network, its population and its spatial configuration
Abstract
This paper investigates the relationship between the extent of a city’s subway network, its population, and its spatial configuration. It constructs panel data describing population, centralization, and the extent of subway systems for all large cities in the world. The data indicates that subways do not cause urban population growth. It also shows that subways cause cities to decentralize, although the effect is smaller than the effects of highways on decentralization. Another finding is that the elasticity of subway ridership to subway extent is around 0.6.
This paper is a part of a Global Research Programme on Spatial Development of Cities, funded by the Multi Donor Trust Fund on Sustainable Urbanization of the World Bank and supported by the UK Department for International Development
Citation
Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, Matthew A. Turner (2016) Subways and Urban Growth: Evidence from Earth