The Congestion Relief Benefit of Public Transit: Evidence from Rome

Martin W. Adler, Federica Liberini, Antonio Russo and Jos van Ommeren ()

No 7698, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We estimate the effect of public transport supply on travel times of motor-vehicle and bus users in Rome, Italy. We apply a quasi-experimental methodology exploiting hourly information on public transport service reductions during strikes. We find that a 10 percent reduction in public transit supply increases the travel time of motor-vehicles by about 1.6 percent in the morning peak. The effect on bus travel time is similar. The congestion-relief benefit of public transport is thus sizeable and bus travel time gains account for an important share of it. We also examine the welfare effects of providing bus lanes. All else given, a bus lane reduces bus travel time by at least 29 percent. We find that bus lanes are undersupplied in Rome, despite the potential costs due to reducing capacity available to cars.

Keywords: congestion relief benefit; bus lanes; public transit; strikes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H23 H42 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-reg, nep-tre and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp7698.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The congestion relief benefit of public transit: evidence from Rome (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7698

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().