Suburbanization and the Automobile

Ming Hong Suen and Karen Kopecky

No 134, 2004 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: In 1910 the average American city was a small and densely populated place where the dominant form of intracity transportation was the electric streetcar. Despite the release of the Model T in 1908, less than one percent of Americans owned a car. In contrast, by 1970, almost every family in the US owned at least one automobile. Not only did city size grow between 1910 and 1970, but city population became more evenly spread around the city center: suburbanization. Can the adoption of the automobile account for the decentralization observed throughout US cities during this period? A model of a linear city is developed in which agents choose both whether or not to own a car, and where to live. The model?s steady state is calibrated and estimated to the US data. Declining automobile prices are used to account for increased automobile ownership and suburbanization. The model is able to match the data on car ownership and decentralization for the period 1910 to 1970

Keywords: Automobiles; Suburbanization; Cities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E10 N1 O11 R1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://ideas.repec.org/p/roc/ecavga/6.html main text (text/html)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://ideas.repec.org/p/roc/ecavga/6.html [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://ideas.repec.org:443/p/roc/ecavga/6.html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Suburbanization and the Automobile (2005)
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:red:sed004:134

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2004 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().