Data and Code for: Evaluating the Impact of Urban Transit Infrastructure: Evidence from Bogotá’s TransMilenio

This repository contains code and data to replicate results in "Evaluating the Impact of Urban Transit Infrastructure: Evidence from Bogotá’s TransMilenio". This paper estimates the equilibrium effects of improving public transit infrastructure on city structure and welfare. It begins by developing a quantitative urban model with multiple groups of workers and transit modes. A special case of this model admits a sufficient statistics approach that measures aggregate welfare gains from improved transit in a broader class of models. The paper then estimates the reduced-form elasticities needed to implement the approach using data spanning the construction of the world’s largest Bus Rapid Transit system in Bogotá, Colombia. This class of models performs well in explaining the adjustment of economic activity to the system. The standard approach for measuring the welfare gains from new infrastructure based on the value of travel time saved only accounts for 52% of the total welfare gain. Using the more general model to assess the distributional consequences, there is little impact on inequality after accounting for reallocation and general equilibrium effects.