Summary

• Robert Ayres, a professor of environment and management at INSEAD, contacted Eric Britton of EcoPlan, asking if useful information might be found via the Internet on a specific subject: notably, the availability of data drawn from experience showing eventual relationships between specific transportation investments and projects, and real estate values in the place where they were supposed to have beneficial impacts.
• To this end an informal discussion platform was set up on this topic under The Commons via the @Access - Sustainable Transportation Forum, in parallel with a classic Web search together with a series of exchanges via a number of specialized Discussion Lists). This cooperative search led to a report which is now freely available for consultation and comment on the @Access Web site. . (For further background on the project and its results, go to the site at www.ecoplan.org/access/
• The main finding of this informal collaborative inquiry is that there does not appear to be a great deal around by way of solid data on our topic. Around the world the idea of improving real estate values is often given great play in the build up of a new transport project or investment, but once the funds have been acquired and the project actually built, few sponsors, agencies or places appear to make the effort to verify what has actually taken place in that instance.
• Despite these limitations, a provisional shortlist of candidate cites and projects have been identified, along with contact information for eventual follow-up purposes.
• Solid international data on this subject could be highly useful, including for making the case of the sort of "softer" transportation projects and investments that so often can make a real difference in the quality of life in a place (traffic calming, strategic parking, pedestrian policies, public transport realignment, home zones, play streets and the like).
• We do not know of the existence of any models that may have been constructed specifically to permit the easy manipulation and analysis of such project data for planning or other purposes, but it is not hard to see that such a model could be quite useful both for analytic and policy purposes.
• The electronic forum is being maintained on @Access over the remainder of this year in an attempt (a) to get additional material and feedback on this important public interest topic and (b) to see if in the process a team or research partners can be identified who might be interested in advancing this agenda, either in the area of data collection, model building and testing, or actually linking such models to specific transportation and environment decisions on the ground.
• For further information on this project and its intended follow-up, you are invited to contact postmaster@ecoplan.org.

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Initial Problem Statement

"Here is our question to your network:"

• "As an environmental and management research and educational organization, CMER has a long standing interest in the development of decision tools in both the public and private sectors. In this context, we have been working of late on the concept of developing an analytic model that might be useful for predicting impacts of different transport investment choices on the quality of life in a given place.
• "In brief, our approach is based on the idea that a city manager or mayor should seek to maximize the value of the economic assets of the city, as reflected in land rents (real estate values). (This approach is closely analogous to the idea of maximizing stockholder value.) Land values clearly reflect all kinds of other amenity values, from clean air to safety.
• "Our approach is, therefore, to investigate changes in land values resulting from explicit changes in the transportation infrastructure, broadly considered. Such changes might include the construction of road improvements, parking garages, new street lights, bicycle paths, new bus or rail lines, one-way streets, traffic calming, pedestrian zones and the like.
• "But does the data support this? Who has done what of late that might help us and others better understand the reality of these issues and relationships.
• "Are there one or several cities or project teams out there that might be interested in cooperating with us to test and fine tune a model that we are developing with the intention of providing a handy analytic tool for policy and decision makers in their choice of projects, locations and approaches?
• "Is there any way that the Internet could be used to help answer these questions?"

Robert Ayres, Professor
Center for the Management of the Environment and Resources
INSEAD- Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires

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Methodological Note

Center for the Management of the Environment and Resources INSEAD - Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires 77305 Fontainebleau France (www.insead.fr/research/cmer/) Robert Ayres, Professor of Environmental Management robert.ayres@insead.fr

ecopl@n -- Technology & Social Systems Le Frene, 8/10 rue Joseph Bara 75006 Paris France (http://www.ecoplan.org) Francis E. K. Britton, Director - eric.britton@ecoplan.org

The Commons - at http://www.ecoplan.org

@Access - The Sustainable Transportation Forum at http://www.ecoplan.org/access

Sustran Resource Centre and Discussion List A0602 Palm Court, Brickfields 50470 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. http://www.geocities.com/Rainforest/Canopy/2853 Paul Barter, Research Officer, sustran@po.jaring.my

Universities' Transport Study Group Discussion List (UTSG) Institute for Transport Studies, Leeds University Leeds LS2 9JT England http://www.its.leeds.ac.uk/utsg/utsgmain.html F.O. Montgomery Senior Lecturer F.O.Montgomery@its.leeds.ac.uk

Transportation Research Board, National Academy of Sciences 2101 Constitution Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20418 (www.nas.edu/) Barbara Post, Manager, Information Services, bpost@nas.edu

For further background on how the project has been organized as well as for the latest round of results you are referred to @Access - The Sustainable Transportation Forum at www.ecoplan.org/access

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Cities/Projects Short List (as per 18 Aug.)

For each city and project we provide where available leads as to where further detail and supporting information might be found (see footnotes in each case). It might also work out that these contacts could eventually help to identify sources to collaborate with a follow-up program, including the possibility of developing and using site data to test and find tune a model currently under development at CMER. This however is work for a later stage.

This listing is currently being cross-checked and further developed through the @Access Sustainable Transportation Forum Joint Projects cooperative activity where it has been posted for review and comment at www.ecoplan.org/access. It would not be surprising if it were amended and extended in the months ahead, bearing in mind that it is being maintained for comment on the @Access - The Sustainable Transportation Forum at http://www.ecoplan.org/access, and bearing in mind that this first inquiry has only taken a first rough cut at the topic.

This is, as you will note, a very mixed lot indeed, though we would note the heavy emphasis within this sample on public transport and road infrastructure projects. (We comment in Section 4 below on the lack of smaller, traffic calming sorts of projects in this first listing.)

To put this listing into perspective, we recommend that you go on to read both the following "Commentary", and if time permits at least read through the email responses that will be found in Annex A below. This broader base of material and perspective is really quite vital to understanding both what is going on in this general area of research, policy and practice, and of what might usefully be done next with the ideas that are set out here.

• Adelaide, Australia -- O-Bus Project
• Alameda Corridor Project, California
• Belfast -- Urban Area study
• Bilbao, Spain
• Boston, Massachusetts -- Central Artery/Tunnel
• Copenhagen -- Ørestad Development Corporation project
• Dade County, Florida --
• Detroit, Michigan -- Detroit Downtown People Mover
• Greater Manchester Metrolink, -- U.K.
• Irvine, California (corridor urban rail project)
• Los Angeles, California -- Light rail projects, Hollywood Freeway
• Newcastle Upon Tyne (Tyne and Wear Metro)
• Oxford, U. K. - general studies
• Portland, Oregon
• San Francisco, California - BART
• South Yorkshire Supertram, Sheffield
• University of California - Irvine Project
• University of Texas study
• Washington, D.C. (Dulles highway, Metro)

In the full draft report, for each city and project one or more sources of further information and eventual contact points are identified. As of now, no groups have indicated their interest in working with CMER for model testing and development based on a local site and appropriate database. We anticiapte however that discussions will follow this next stage of contacts.

Commentary (as per 18 Aug.)

Scire ubi aliquid invenire possis, ea demum maxima pars eruditionis est
(To know where you can find anything, that in short is the largest part of learning.)
--Anonymous

For anyone whose daily work involves identifying, planning and implementing transportation projects and investments that are intended to make that street or neighborhood into a more sustainable place (quality of life, economic viability), at first glance this assignment looks like a no brainer. Without a doubt, clever transportation investments that increase life quality in the impact zone are going to have a positive effect on land values!

But that of course was not the question. What Ayres was asking us to report on is not our opinions, no matter how firmly held. but rather what does the data show? Or, as a first step, to report as to whether or not there such data around?

Here in brief is the result of our quick survey, which we propose that you read against the broader backdrop that is provided in the information, views and counsel that follows.

In particular we suggest you read this against the information and comments that have been provided by all those who were kind enough to reply to our contact effort, which you will find reproduced in the fourth and last section of this short report.

Beyond that you may find it useful to visit the annexed materials that has been brought together in the closing sections of this report, which we find go a long way to putting these matters into perspective.

(The following observations are numbered for eventual future reference and discussion under the @Access - The Sustainable Transportation Forum at http://www.ecoplan.org/access site.)

1. Our survey suggests that there is probably enough information and enough possible contacts with interest and experience in this area for the CMER to pursue its effort to refine and test their model based on one or more sets of site date. The information in the preceding section should suffice to permit you to initiate this contact effort.
2. That said, there certainly does not appear to be a great abundance of hard data out there on our topic - at least not of the nature that would permit one to provide a definitive answer of a general sort to this question. Moreover, with apparent rare exceptions, there does not appear to be a great deal of data around even at the specific project or place level that can help us to resolve this problem. (But fortunately theres does appear to be enough for the present testing purposes.) There appear to be a number of reasons for this lacuna.
3. One is that while a lot of claims for benefits of this sort are often made by those who are proponents of a given investment or project, ex ante -- - whether it is a classical road project, major pubic transport investment, or even the sort of "softer" infrastructure investments of the sort that interest us here -- once the venture gets approved and under way there appears to be very little interest or incentive in actually putting hard numbers to these claims based on actual achieved results.
4. There have been several waves of interest in this general topic in both administrative and some academic circles over the last generation. In the mid/late seventies, for example, there was a fair wave of publications and conferences on the concept of "value capture"; however this was mainly driven by the push at the time to fund large pubic transit projects in US cities with federal moneys. Once those funds dried up, the interest in "value capture" appears to have waned as well.
5. It also turns out that it is quite hard to get such data and relationships right, at least in most cases. The difficullty is of course that transportation investments rarely occur in a vacuum. The places in which they are made are inevitably living places, and a great deal is usually going on at the same time which could impact on those same land values. It is no easy job therefore to sort out all these variable.
6. That said, given the sort of relatively quickly implemented projects of the sort that Ayres refers to (e.g., traffic calming et al), it should be possible to get some useful results along these lines. Getting them however is no easy task, and does not seem to be the sort of thing that the statistics takers concern themselves with in most places.
7. The best way to do this in any given place? Our guess is that what is needed is some imaginative detective work, as opposed to the usual desk based use of canned statistics. A search of newspaper archives (real estate ads), people and firms who actually engage in the market, a tour of the appropriate tax offices… all these, properly carried out and carefully pieced together should yield some interesting and useful results in any given place.
8. As far as some sort of wider international database along these lines is concerned however, we ourselves have not uncovered one. There is an interesting analogy, however, that can be seen in an annex of the book "Sustainability and Cities : Overcoming Automobile Dependence" by Peter Newman, and Jeffrey Kenworthy (Island Press; ISBN: 1559636602), entitled "Data and Methodology for the Thirty-seven-city Study for the World Bank", where they have usefully pieced together city data which are for the most part just as hard to get at as the values which we are concerned with here.
9. This suggests to me that it could be a great contribution if anyone who reads this note might have the good idea of crating a similar international survey, this time aimed at our worthy topic.
10. One of the reasons that it is hard to sell these softer transportation concepts is indeed that they are often considered to be trivial and without any hard or economic aspects. Observation, however, suggests that this is not the case. That well planned projects appropriate to that pace can indeed have positive economic impacts in terms of real estate and land values in the impact zone. The problem is, however, that there is not much solid proof around of this.
11. Perhaps the World Bank, the European Commission, some national Ministries or Departments of transport or the environment might chose to give this their attention.
12. Such a project, well planned, would make use of a number of local teams, and could also provide some interesting training opportunities for junior personnel or graduate students as they participate in an international team project that might make a difference.

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Full Report

Your Feedback, Ideas, Suggestions

If you have any ideas or reactions to any of this, you are invited to use Group Mail to contact the forum as a whole or a private note to the @Access team.

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