Does an Improved Urban Bus Service Affect House Values?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This study aims at testing whether, and to what extent, the overall quality in the supply of an urban bus service translates into higher house values for properties located along the lines; Quebec City, Canada, is used as a case study. The study relies on a database provided by the former Quebec Urban Community Assessment Division and, once filtered, includes 11,291 detached and attached single-family house sales that took place in Quebec City between January 1993 and February 1997. In addition to sale prices and conditions, property specifics, local amenity and taxation, time trend as well as socioeconomic and overall accessibility attributes, the database also includes mass transit (MT) network quality attributes accounting for bus frequency, route diversity and bus stop accessibility. Three bus service levels are considered—namely regular routes, the Metrobus and the Express—while four mutually exclusive buffer zones are used for measuring house value impacts. All information is handled through a regional geographic information system (GIS). The hedonic approach is resorted to in order to assess the magnitude and direction of MT-related externalities for properties located along bus routes and in the vicinity of bus stops. Findings suggest that increasing regular bus frequencies results, by and large, in lower house values for properties located in the vicinity of regular routes; and the reverse is true for Express lines, which exert a substantial, positive influence on prices. Thus, by offering a more direct and efficient (fewer stops) as well as more comfortable mode than both the regular and Metrobus services, the Express actually proves to be a convenient substitute to the private car for suburban homeowners with a regular working schedule. Findings also suggest that a greater destination choice for homeowners, expressed as the number of routes available within a five-minute walk from home, affects property values upward. Finally, the number of bus stops available at a distance of between 100 and 400 meters from home drives house prices down by a factor that lessens with distance. Thus, the additional noise and traffic disturbances thereby generated seem to prevail over an easier access to the MT network.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".