Here come the bikes: Cycling infrastructure and housing prices

Miquel-Àngel Garcia-López (), Marianna Magagnoli () and Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal ()
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Miquel-Àngel Garcia-López: Department of Applied Economics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain & IEB, Spain.
Marianna Magagnoli: German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), Germany & IEB, Spain.
Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal: Department of Economics, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain & CEPR.

Working Papers from Department of Applied Economics at Universitat Autonoma of Barcelona

Abstract: We estimate how two complementary forms of cycling infrastructure, cycle lanes and bike-sharing stations, capitalize into housing prices in Barcelona. We distinguish the presence of infrastructure from its use, which we capture recovering bike traffic across the entire street network from bike-sharing trip records. We combine geolocated sale and rental listings with digitized records of every cycle-lane segment and bike-sharing station and estimate hedonic price gradients across concentric 50-meter rings rather than a single proximity indicator. We find an asymmetry by infrastructure type and tenure. Sales respond more to stations and rents respond more to cycle lanes; station effects stay positive and fade with distance, whereas lane effects are concentrated nearby and turn negative farther out. We read this through a road-space trade-off that varies with resident characteristics. When we move from the provision of infrastructure to its use, we find that doubling local traffic raises sale prices far more than physical presence alone. This indicates that residents capitalize a well-connected, well-ridden network rather than mere adjacency. Capitalization is positive but modest, too small to support strong gentrification concerns.

Keywords: Cities; cycling; housing prices; consumption amenities; neighborhood composition. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2026-07
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