The Access to Opportunities Project, live webinar with preliminary results

This week, on Sept 18 at 7pm (GMT), we will be broadcasting a live webinar to present some of the preliminary results of the Access to Opportunities Project. The webinar will be broadcast in Portuguese on this link and we will also be answering questions about the project.

Here is a quick summary about the project:

How many jobs can one access in less than an hour using public transport? How long does it take to get to your nearest healthcare facility or school? The answers to these questions are a direct result of the urban and transport policies implemented in our cities. These policies largely determine the ease with which people from different social groups and income levels can access employment opportunities, health and education services. These policies play a key role in building more just and inclusive cities and reducing inequalities in access to opportunities. Although the issue of transport accessibility has been widely studied in cities in the Global North, this topic has received much less attention in the global South and particularly in Brazil.

My team and I at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea) are launching the Access to Opportunities Project to map and analyze urban accessibility in Brazilian cities. The purpose of the project is to estimate accessibility to job opportunities, schools and health services by public transport, walking, cycling and driving at high spatial resolution for all of the largest urban areas in the country. This year, the project will include public transport accessibility estimates for 6 major cities (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Fortaleza, Porto Alegre and Curitiba), as well as walking and cycling accessibility estimates for the 20 largest cities in Brazil. We are planning to expand the project soon to include other urban areas.

The Access to Opportunities Project is carried out in collaboration with the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP - Brazil), and it will bring annual updates on the accessibility landscape of Brazilian cities. One of the expected results of the project is to generate a wealth of data that will be made publicly available to policy makers and researchers, with whom we will be able to collaborate to analzye particular case studies and conduct international comparative research.

Comparing public transport ridership trends in the USA and France

Yonah Freemark (Twitter) is a PhD student at MIT and author of The Transport Politic, probably one of the most widely read websites in the field of transportation research and policy. Yonah has recently published a very great piece looking at the trends of public transport ridership between 2002 and 2018 for the 30 largest urban areas in the USA and France. This is the general outlook:

"Between 2002 and 2010, both countries saw increases in transit use in their major cities. The average U.S. city’s ridership increased by 6 percent over that time (though the peak was in 2008). [...]. This trend has diverged dramatically since the Great Recession, however. While the average French urban region saw its ridership increase by 32 percent between 2010 and 2018, U.S. regions saw ridership decline by 6 percent on average."

The piece is interesting throughout, with a nuanced analysis of what could explain the success and failure of French and American cities in building public transport ridership. Highly recommended.

Ridership changes in major urban regions, including the Bay Area (combining San Francisco and San Jose urban areas) and Seattle.

Credit: Yonah Freemark

The life of graduate students

True story.

ps. Some habits do not go away after one graduates...

credit: Sandy Serena

R tip of the day

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Message of the Day

via You Hand One Job

Who wins and who loses from rent control?

Short/simple answer: everyone loses in the long run.

Last year, I shared here a NBER Working Paper by Rebecca Diamond (Stanford) and colleagues on the effects of rent control on tenants, landlords, and inequality. This issue always makes a comeback and since the paper has has now been published on AER, I thought it would be good to post about this study again. Thanks Max Roser and Carlos Goes for the pointers

Diamond, Rebecca, Tim McQuade, and Franklin Qian. 2019. The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco. American Economic Review, 109 (9): 3365-94. [ungated version of the paper]

Abstract

Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study its impacts on tenants and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking individuals' migration, we find rent control limits renters' mobility by 20 percent and lowers displacement from San Francisco. Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15 percent by selling to owner-occupants and redeveloping buildings. Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law.

Urban Picture

Seoul, South Korea

image credit: Maxar and Daily Overview

My interview for the Caos Planejado podcast

Today is the 5th anniversary of Caos Planejado, a great Brazilian blog focused on urban planning, economics and innovation. Long live! Anthony Ling (the head of Caos Planejado) interviewed me for their podcast a few months ago, when we talked about my PhD research, my ongoing work on the Access to Opportunities Project and other topics related to innovation, data and equity in urban mobility. The interview was recorded in Portuguese and you can listen to it here.

The influence of ride-hailing on users' travel behavior

New paper hot off the press, by Alejandro Tirachini (Twitter).

Tirachini, A., & del Río, M. (2019). Ride-hailing in Santiago de Chile: users’ characterisation and effects on travel behaviour. Transport Policy. Volume 82, October 2019, Pages 46-57

Abstract:

In this paper, an in-depth examination of the use of ride-hailing (ridesourcing) in Santiago de Chile is presented based on data from an intercept survey implemented across the city in 2017. First, a sociodemographic analysis of ride-hailing users, usage habits, and trip characteristics is introduced, including a discussion of the substitution and complementarity of ride-hailing with existing public transport. It is found that (i) ride-hailing is mostly used for occasional trips, (ii) the modes most substituted by ride-hailing are public transport and traditional taxis, and (iii) for every ride-hailing rider that combines with public transport, there are 11 riders that substitute public transport. Generalised ordinal logit models are estimated; these show that (iv) the probability of sharing a (non-pooled) ride-hailing trip decreases with the household income of riders and increases for leisure trips, and that (v) the monthly frequency of ride-hailing use is larger among more affluent and younger travellers. Car availability is not statistically significant to explain the frequency of ride-hailing use when age and income are controlled; this result differs from previous ride-hailing studies. We position our findings in this extant literature and discuss the policy implications of our results to the regulation of ride-hailing services in Chile.

 

geobr: easy access to official spatial data sets of Brazil

I'm glad to annouce that geobr is now officially available on CRAN. Here and here are quick intros on how to use geobr to get easy and quick access to shape files and other official spatial data sets of Brazil. The package currently includes several data sets for various years such as states, regions, municipalities, census tracts, statistical grid and others. The github repository is this, in case you want to keep track of the latest developments.

The package was developed by my team and I at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea). We are constantly working to expand and improve the package, so if you have any suggestions/contributions, please feel free to open an issue on Github.