Properly implemented transit infrastructure provides benefits for a community in multiple ways.
Transportation is one of society’s main pillars, offering physical connections that drive healthy commerce, industry, education, and interpersonal relationships. The impact of public transit on these societal features is difficult to quantify. Still, in the late 80’s and early 90’s, Real Estate Economics attempted to provide an analysis of the effect of Chicago’s Midway Line on the Chicago housing market.
The study closely monitored the housing prices before, during, and after the construction of the Midway Line and concluded that there was a strong correlation between the market and the presence of the light rail line. According to McMillen and McDonald, the methods they used “produce[d] empirical results showing that the opening of the transit line in late 1993 had been anticipated in the housing market beginning in the late 1980s.” The prices of the houses nearby increased by 6.9 percent compared to homes farther from nearest transit stations. The total increase in property values was about $215.9 million, which translates to about $6,000 per home.
The benefits of accessible transportation are numerous, but there are certainly costs that need to be considered.
To better understand the challenges faced by a transit project such as this, we examined the lessons learned from Toronto’s Metrolinx Transit Plan in 2017. This project encountered 3 main categories of difficulties:
1. Politics
Legislators showed both great support and disdain for the Metrolinx project, which stagnated progress for great lengths of time. The main complaint that politicians posed was the cost that this infrastructure project posed.
2. Cost
Toronto’s overall plan for its large-scale overhaul was projected to cost $45 billion. To put things in perspective for our purposes, the recently commissioned Canada Line in British Columbia cost $177 million per mile. The Canada Line is 11.9 miles long, so the entire extension cost an estimated $2.1 billion. Because projects of this scale play within such grand price thresholds, there is strong incentive to find the most cost effective pathways to take to achieve the transportation goals.
3. Land use decisions
As Miasek succinctly puts it in his article for The Star, “Transit needs density and density needs transit” (2017). In other words, in the process of planning, it is imperative to consider the densities of the areas that the transit route will transect to maximize its impact and efficiency.