https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1728-6901
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ABSTRACT
This study investigates the effects of Park & Ride (P&R) facilities, which aim to increase the attractiveness of commuting by public transport, on population growth in suburban areas. We employ a difference-in-differences approach to parking capacity extensions of seven P&R facilities outside the central business district of the city of Vienna between 2012 and 2016. Specifically, using fine-grained grid population data, we compare population growth in close distance to the P&R facility to population growth in surrounding municipalities. We find that the expansion of a P&R facility, which is located at least 20 min away from a main public transport station in Vienna, causes population growth of, on average, 1.6–1.9% in neighbouring municipalities compared to those where the P&R facility is located. This accounts for up to 15% of the total population growth in the respective regions between 2008 and 2019 and highlights the role of P&R facilities in fostering suburbanization and the suburban sprawl.
Acknowledgements
The authors want to thank Johannes Berger, Michael Berlemann, Nikolaus Graf, Monika Köppl-Turyna, Ludwig Strohner, and Tobias Thomas for their valuable comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Alternatively, we considered to use a propensity-score matching algorithm comparing regions around a certain P&R facility with similar areas along a railway line without a P&R facility. However, there are no (major) railway stations around Vienna without a P&R facility. Therefore, this approach is not feasible.
2 An isochrone in the context of this study is defined as the area around a P&R facility, which can be reached by car within a certain amount of time. This takes the road infrastructure and the allowed speed limits into account and yields a polygon shape that can be projected on a map.
3 The intersection is based on the centroids of the single grids. That is, a grid cell is assigned to a specific isochrone, if its centroid, i.e. its central point, lies within the polygon shape.
4 In 2018, 257 P&R facilities were located in Lower Austria. Their size ranges between 10 and 1.908 slots per facility. The average (median) size of a P&R facility was 148 (50) slots per facility.
5 In this context, a commuter is defined as an employee who works in a different municipality than he is living in.
6 In contrast, the P&R facilities in Edlitz-Grimmenstein and Lilienfeld are not included in our analysis, since the commuting time of one hour to a working place in Vienna in total is not credible in these cases. The fastest train connections take 52 and 65 min to the closest public transport hub, respectively.
7 in the Appendix shows the event plots for those P&R facilities, which are not included in the regressions due to a missing common pre-treatment trend.
8 As a public transport hub we define a public transport station that connects subway and regional train lines.
9 The number of observations decreases in from 98 to 90 for t − 4. The reason for this is that observations covering P&R 7 (Strasshof) are shifted out of the sample. It was expanded in 2012. Hence, in the basic regression the years 2009–2015 are included. However, we do not have any population grid-data before 2008, which reduces the sample if shifting the treatment to an earlier point in time. However, we argue that the results of the placebo tests are not driven by this, since omitting P&R 7 in the basic model from the sample completely, gives significantly positive results (see Table A1, column 7).
10 See Mun (Citation2019) for a two-region model on the joint provision of transport infrastructure.