From bus to tramway: Is there an economic impact of substituting a rapid mass transit system? An empirical investigation accounting for anticipation effect

Hedonic pricing models and price equations have been extensively used to retrieve the implicit prices of urban externalities through real estate markets. Many applications have been devoted to investigating the impact of new mass transit systems, such as rail infrastructures. However, the implementation of such infrastructures usually takes some time and markets can react with an anticipation effect that can vary according to the different development phases. Moreover, the impact may be different if it acts as a substitute to existing rapid transit services. This paper focuses on the impact of substituting bus rapid transit (BRT) for light rail transit (LRT) services, taking into account temporal and spatial decomposition of the effect of new urban infrastructures using a spatial difference-in-differences (SDID) estimator based on a repeated sales approach. An empirical investigation is conducted for the case of the implementation of the tramway in Dijon (France) between 2008 and 2012 using apartment transactions occurring between 2001 and 2014. The results indicate that the impact of substituting LRT to BRT is partly anticipated at the construction phase, while the cumulative impact returns a complex pattern where the positive effect is mainly concentrated around stations located in the center of the city.