Streetcars and Recovery

Abstract

Researching traditional streetcars' development impacts is challenging: most U.S. lines operate in downtown areas with many development stimuli. This article addresses that challenge through analysis of New Orleans building permits after Hurricane Katrina. We estimate how post-Katrina permit frequency changes with distance from streetcar stops, controlling for damage, proximity to commercial areas, and pre-Katrina demographics. We find that distance to stops strongly predicts building permits. Residential permits increase with distance to stops; commercial permits decrease. Findings confirm streetcars support commercial development, yet suggest potential displacement of residential uses. Implications for future streetcar projects in New Orleans and elsewhere are discussed.

A Twenty-Five-Year Biography of the TOD Concept: From Design to Policy, Planning, and Implementation

“…In the late 1990s and early 2000s, TOD research simply posed the hypothesis of value-added effects of rail for housing and commercial land value. Nowadays, there is solid empirical evidence that rail transit can lead to dynamic real estate development (Guthrie and Fan 2013), although this relationship has taken two decades to be fully acknowledged and accepted. Since 2010, studies have increasingly focused on TODs as market responses to transit development, especially on capitalization of transit proximity through land and housing premiums, and modeled and quantified such effects (Cao and Lou 2018;Duncan 2011aDuncan , 2011bGolub, Guhathakurta, and Sollapuram 2012;Higgins and Kanaroglou 2016;Mathur and Ferrell 2009;Park, Huang, and Newman 2016;Zhang et al 2018).…”

Streetcar Development in China: The Motivations Behind

“…On the other hand, the proponents of streetcar projects often assert transformative changes brought by the streetcar system [18]. Especially in developed countries, streetcar projects have been found to bring various beneficial changes, in terms of increasing land and property prices [18][19][20][21][22], producing local employment and wider economic growth [18,[23][24][25][26], achieving local transit-oriented development (TOD) [27][28][29], etc. Creative city development is then regarded as an underlying but key factor that drives streetcar project developments [30][31][32].…”

“…Within and through neoliberal urbanization, the local governments have been paying more attention and spending more resources on particular civic projects to attract inward investments. The rebirth of the streetcar may prove especially informative concerning the question of making of the creative city for the following reasons: streetcars are exclusively urban [20,[22][23][24][25][26]; they are highly visible flagship projects driven first and foremost by city governance stakeholders along with representatives of local urban capital [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]; they constitute spatially highly concentrated investments in the tens to 100 s of millions of dollars [20][21][22][23][24][25][26]29,30]; and are generally planned in concert with local property (re)investment [30][31][32][33].…”

The Road Less Traveled: Does Rail Transit Matter?

“…Second, few studies test whether the impact of rail transit on road traffic changes over time. Rail transit can generate new development along the corridor (Cervero 1994; Guthrie and Fan 2013) resulting in an increase in trips to the corridor (Cervero 2003).…”