Analyzing willingness to improve the resilience of New York City's transportation system

Hurricane Sandy revealed the higher-risk vulnerability to natural hazards of civil infrastructure systems in coastal megacities such as New York. Traditional sources of funding for both recovering from disasters and preventing future damages are not only limited, but also do not account for benefit transfers of the externalities induced by the provision of resilient infrastructure. In principle, property owners should be willing to pay (WTP) an amount equal to the perceived benefit, if this positive externality is internalized by them following some pricing mechanism. In this paper, we analyze the willingness of residents to financially support improvements in the resilience to extreme events of the transportation system in New York City. Choice microdata was collected for over 1500 residents of the metropolitan NYC area. Several logit-type models were estimated and the preferred model was a discrete-continuous heterogeneity mixture that allows for the derivation of flexible distributions of willingness to pay. Using hypothetical scenarios of recovery, the annual willingness to pay for individuals who missed work ands self identify as politically liberal ranges from $120 to $775, whereas for those individuals that were not directly affected the range is $15-$50.