Multilevel assessment of public transportation infrastructure: a spatial econometric computable general equilibrium approach

摘要

Impact assessment of transportation investment policy is a challenging task as assessment outcome is sensitive to various attributes such as methodology, time period, scale and location of analysis. This study is conducted to evaluate regional impact of public transportation infrastructure in the USA at multilevel geographic scales. The assessment is implemented using a spatial econometric computable general equilibrium approach which integrates spatial econometric techniques with computable general equilibrium models to control for spatial spillover effects. The results found that regional economic impacts of public transportation infrastructure vary substantially by mode and geographic scale. The US highway infrastructure tends to have consistent and dominant impacts on both the US national and regional economy across different geographic scales. The impact of public airport infrastructure tends to be much larger at the national level than state and metropolitan level, whereas the economic contribution of public transit including passenger rail infrastructure tends to be much stronger at the US northeast metro level than the national level of analysis.