Do Atlanta Residents Value MARTA? Selecting an Autoregressive Model to Recover Willingness to Pay

Understanding homeowners’ marginal willingness-to-pay (MWTP) for proximity to public transportation infrastructure is important for planning and policy. Naïve estimates of MWTP, however, may be biased as a result of spatial dependence, spatial correlation, and spatially endogenous variables. In this paper the authors discuss a class of spatial autoregressive models that control for these spatial effects, and apply them to sample data collected for the Atlanta, Georgia housing market. The authors provide evidence that a general-to-specific model selection methodology that relies on the generality of the spatial Durbin model (SDM) should be preferred to the classical specific-to-general methodology that begins with an assumption of no spatial effects. The authors show that applying the SDM widens the confidence interval of the estimate of MWTP for transit proximity in Atlanta, relative to ordinary linear regression. This finding has unpredictable consequences for land value capture forecasts and transportation policy decisions.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADD30 Transportation and Land Development.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Macfarlane, Gregory S
  • Garrow, Laurie A
  • Moreno-Cruz, Juan
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 21p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Property values; Public transit; Regression analysis; Residential location; Spatial analysis
• Identifier Terms: Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority
• Uncontrolled Terms: Willingness to pay
• Geographic Terms: Atlanta (Georgia)
• Subject Areas: Economics; Public Transportation; I10: Economics and Administration;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01516567
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-2084
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 28 2014 1:32PM