Investigating how rapid transit upgrades affect vehicle use and urban growth, indicating the need for supportive policies.
Why do improvements in public transit sometimes result in an increase in private vehicle use, and sometimes a decrease? We investigate improvements in rapid transit (RT) within a monocentric city model featuring congestion in commuting modes, and mode choice between public RT and private vehicles. While RT improvements increase city size, population, and aggregate land values, their effect on private vehicle use depends on road congestion levels. Vehicle kilometres travelled can increase after an RT improvement when roads are sufficiently congested. Policies to reduce road use in congested cities by improving RT should be paired with disincentives to private transportation.
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Greenaway‐McGrevy et al. (2024) studied this question.
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