Effect of Transport Improvements on Urban Form, Employment Location and Prices =Efectos de mejoras en transporte en la forma urbana, localización del empleo y los precios

This research gives evidence for Bogota, Colombia, a major city in a developing country that massive public transport improvements have had strong relationships with population density, employment density, floor space density and property prices. The study also shows that the location of economic activity has been decentralizing in the city during the period from 1990 to 2005 that is consistent with findings in the literature for developed countries. The research is reported in three chapters.;The first chapter examines the impacts of the massive Transmilenio Bus Rapid Transit system introduced in the city of Bogota, Colombia in the year 2000, on population density, floor space density and property prices. The econometric models take into account the potential endogeneity of the variables of interest by using the tramway that worked in the city from 1885 to 1951 as source of exogenous variation. We find that each kilometer away from Transmilenio stations decreases the floor space density by 211,000 m2/km2 on average, and prices per square meter by 89 USD per square meter on average. Every kilometer away from the system increases average property prices by 1.22% over a period of 15 years. The increase in density away from the Transmilenio stations reflects the fact that the city is growing towards outlying areas, given that areas close to the stations are already developed and the redevelopment of such areas into higher densities takes time.;In chapter 2 I apply the McDonald (1987) and the Ban Arnott and McDonald (2017) methods to identify business subcenters in the City of Bogota, for the years 1990 and 2005. With both methods I am able to identify the same basic 11 subcenters for 1990 and the same 14 subcenters for 2005. The flexibility of the BAM method allows some more subcenters to be identified by increasing the rate by which the cutoff density falls from the center of the city. In the second part of this chapter, I examine whether the identified subcenters help determine property prices in the city using the railroad network established in 1865 and used until the mid-fifties for trading purposes, as source of exogenous variation to take care of potential endogeneity problems between property prices and the location of the subcenters. Result show that the location of economic activity was decentralizing during the period of study and that distance to business subcenters have a negative effect on the price of property per square meter of terrain and on the square meters of floor space.;Chapter 3 investigates the relationship between Transmilenio improvements and the location of economic activity. I find that the improvements played an important role on the location of economic activity in both 2005 and 2011. Each kilometer away from a Transmilenio station decreased the employment density by 0.67% in 2005 and by 0.62% in 2011. The transport improvements had a positive impact on the change in employment density between 2005 and 2011. In addition, the distance to Transmilenio decreased by 5.3% the probability of a transport zone to be a jobs subcenter in 2011. But the probability of a ZAT that was not a jobs subcenter in 2005 to become a new subcenter in 2011 increases in 1.75% with distance to Transmilenio, this could be explained also because the areas close to the stations were already developed.