Value of accessibility to Bogota's bus rapid transit system

With several successful cases world-wide, bus rapid transit (BRT) has re-emerged as a cost-effective transportation alternative for urban mobility. Despite the resurgence of BRT, there is a world-wide paucity of research examining its ability to spur land development. By estimating spatial hedonic price functions, the paper determines the extent to which access to BRT stations in Bogota, Colombia, currently are capitalized into land values. Results suggest that for every 5 min of additional walking time to a BRT station, the rental price of a property decreases by between 6.8 and 9.3%, after controlling for structural characteristics, neighbourhood attributes and proximity to the BRT corridor. Evaluated at the average walking time to a BRT station, this effect translates into an elasticity of between -0.16 and -0.22. Although these estimates cannot be attributable directly to the presence of the BRT system because a cross-sectional design is used, they suggest that the land market in Bogota values access to BRT station locations.