Public transit and urban accessibility : the effect of the métrobus service on Quebec city’s house prices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper investigates whether, and to what extent, the introduction of an improved, high-frequency bus service on Quebec City’s main streets in 1992 and its extension in the following years resulted in any significant change, either upwards or downwards, in the value of residential properties adjacent to the bus route or located in its vicinity. The final database consists of over 11,500 single-family detached, attached and row houses which have been subject, over the 1987-2004 period, to at least one resale following an initial sale. The resale-to-sale price ratio is used as the dependent variable and regressed against mass transit attributes, with a series of control descriptors accounting for property specifics (property age, type, size and lot size), fiscal (local tax rate) and macro-economic (regional market trend, overall inflation, real mortgage rate and real estate cycle) attributes as well as environmental (noise level), socioeconomic and accessibility dimensions. Independent variables consist of either state or change descriptors, depending on their nature, with the latter being expressed as resale-to-sale ratios. Three mass transit descriptors are developed: while a first ratio variable measures the change in mass transit modal share between sale and resale, two dummy variables account for the proximity to an intensive Métrobus service and the introduction of the Métrobus service between sale and resale. A semi-log functional form is resorted to. Several independent variables are also applied a logarithmic transformation so as to generate parameter estimates in the form of elasticity coefficients. While all three mass transit attributes significantly contribute to explain house price variations in Quebec City over the 1987-2004 period, findings suggest that the change in mass transit modal share between sale and resale is most influential and impacts positively on the dependent variable: doubling the local MT share translates into a 5.7% increase in house value growth. The proximity to an intensive Métrobus service also impacts significantly and positively on house price variations, with properties benefiting from this attribute selling at a premium of 5.2%. Finally, and contrary to our expectations, properties located close to a bus route on which the Métrobus service was introduced between sale and resale sell at a 2.5% discount. Such a finding suggests that the extension of the Métrobus service in mostly peripheral areas of the city has turned into a negative externality for local residents for whom mass transit is not an adequate alternative to the car.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".