ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Assessing the Impact of Urban Rail Transit on Urban Vitality: A Big-Data-Based Approach

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 03 | MOBILITY

Speaker

Ms Wenyu Lyu (Tongji University)

Description

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) aims to guide urban development through rail transit, with rail transit stations serving as pivotal urban nodes for the concentration of people and urban activities. The opening of new rail transit lines can increase the attractiveness of the station areas by improving accessibility and fostering changes in land use and amenities, thereby enhancing urban vitality. While numerous studies have shown the impact of rail transit stations on travel behavior and property values, few have provided empirical evidence on the vitality changes in the station areas.
Employing a difference-in-differences (DID) modeling framework, we assess the impact of rail transit on the urban vitality of the station areas, using the opening of Shanghai Metro Line 15 as a natural experiment. The urban vitality is measured by the number of residents, workers, and visitors clustered in the station areas, along with the visiting frequency, duration of stay, and distances from the stations to the homes of visitors, using a large mobile signaling dataset from 2017 to 2021 in Shanghai. We define the treatment group as areas close to the metro stations (within 500 meters of the station) and the control group as areas further away from the stations (beyond 500 meters), ensuring that the closest station for both the treatment and control groups is a Line 15 station. We find that the opening of a new metro station can increase the overall population clustered, number of visitors, and their visiting frequency in the treatment areas, relative to the control areas. Despite an increase in the number of visits, the duration of stay of visitors per person in the treatment areas has decreased. Additionally, the visitors reside in areas more distant from the metro stations after the openning, suggesting a broader influence radius of the stations.
The rail transit effects on urban vitality show significant spatial and temporal heterogeneity. We adopt a Difference-in-Difference-in-Differences (DDD) model to investigate the spatial heterogeneity of the effects between interchange and non-interchange stations, as well as stations inside and outside the outer ring road of Shanghai. The results show that the interchange stations have significantly higher attractiveness to visitors and higher visiting frequency increase compared with normal stations. Compared to stations within the outer ring road, stations located outside the outer ring road attracted more residents and visitors from further distances. To explore temporal heterogeneity, we divided the study period into weekdays and weekends, conducting DID regression for both groups separately. The results revealed that, the rail transit effect in attracting more people, especially more visitors, is higher on weekdays than on weekends.
This study combines big data and DID analysis to assess the treatment effect of rail transit on urban vitality and uses several years of panel data to capture the dynamic changes in vitality. The research findings have significant policy implications for TOD and initiatives to enhance the overall livability and attractiveness of urban spaces.

References

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