An economic analysis of complete streets policies

This paper tests whether adoption of a Complete Streets policy (a transport policy and design approach that requires streets to be designed and operated to allow equal access to all people and major forms of transportation, rather than just motor vehicles) has amenity value for local residents by analyzing the link between Complete Streets policy adoption and house prices using a difference-in-differences matching procedure (DIDMP). We employ this DIDMP because commonly employed least-squares-regression techniques may fail to fully account for selection effects. We show that commonly employed least-squares-regression techniques generally overestimate the effect of a Complete Streets policy and using DIDMP we find that Complete Streets policy adoption had no statistically significant effect on house prices.