Victo David Bernal Pavas (p), Gustavo Adolfo Garcìa Cruz, Jorge Eduardo Pérez

Spatial disconnections from jobs may lead to negative outcomes on labor market, this relationship is referred as Spatial Mismatch. In Medellín, the public transport and infrastructure policies have been very relevant during the last few years. Therefore, it is interesting and policy-relevant to analyze how spatial disconnection from jobs has evolved in Medellín, and its effects on the city’s labor market.

Travel times have been increasing since 2005. In 2012, an average trip in Medellín used to take 33 minutes. In 2017 that time increased to 36 minutes despite of improvements in infrastructure. The data for this paper is taken from the “Destination-origin survey (EOD for its acronym in Spanish) for the years 2012 and 2017. This survey provides information about travel times and trips in Medellín and data from SIT areas (Integrated transport system areas).

Distance itself is not a proper measure to be related with the Spatial Mismatch because there are many features that can’t be captured by distance. Someone could be very far from a job, but transport accessibility could be excellent or that person could like that job and therefore ignore other opportunities close by. However, there might not be jobs around, and distance does not capture that. This is why it is important to have a measure that uses travel times, transport accessibility and an opportunity costs measure for jobs in surrounding areas.

This paper aims to study Spatial Mismatch and its evolution in Medellin using a measure that weights the number of jobs in each zone and the travel times between different zones by three different ways of transportation: walking, public and private transport. Also providing an important tool to propose policies that may mitigate Spatial Mismatch in Medellín.

Based on similar approaches and the information we have from the EOD, it is reasonable to think that there is certainty of the existence of increasing Spatial Mismatch for the city related with the increasing reported travel times. So, this paper hopes to give a general picture of the problem and to show how the transport policies might have not been good enough to deal with this important matter.

Suzana Quinet de Bastos (p), Fabio Gama, Matheus Milosz, Tiana Assis

According to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (2004), motoring analyzes around the world usually focus on the automobile. However, studies that address the two-wheel motorized vehicles should also be produced, especially in developing countries where its growth have presented a significant evolution. In Brazil, the portrait of mobility has been undergoing major changes in recent decades, mainly reflecting the intense and accelerated process of urbanization and disorderly growth of cities, as well as the increasingly intense use of individual motorized transport by the population.
In this context, this article evaluates the evolution of motorcycle adoption in Brazil. More specifically, we aim to empirically understand the relationship between the number of two-wheeled vehicles and the country's level of development. The work uses data for 5565 Brazilian municipalities from 2010 to 2016 and implements a fixed-effects panel model.
The results indicate an inverse relationship between income and number of motorcycles, corroborating the hypothesis of a Kuznets curve for motorcycles and income level in Brazil. That is, the adoption rate of the vehicle on two wheels increases after a certain minimum level of income, evolves, and then reduces when the population reaches higher levels of income. In addition to the validation of the increase in the number of motorcycles observed in the country in recent years, we also find evidence that the increase in the number of motorcycles in municipalities may be related to the drop in formal employment, and big municipalities have the lowest per capita motorcycle ratio.
Evidence also shows the continuous increase in motorcycles ownership in Brazil. Having in mind the low level of income of the Brazilian population in general, it is expected that the country will remain below the Kuznets curve turning point for a long period, experiencing the evolution of the motorcycle fleet. In this context, public policies aimed at promoting income and reducing Brazilian regional economic inequalities are recommended.

Elodie Brinck, Christoph Geibinger, Petra Staufer-Steinnocher (p)

Accessibility of public transport and infrastructure for persons with reduced mobility (PRMs) is an important topic addressed by the European Union in its Technical Specifications for Interoperability in railway traffic to make traveling barrier-free and accessible. Thus, in public transport PRMs need appropriate attention and an alignment of public transportation services with their particular needs in order to make the service available to all passengers. In this research, experiences with public train services utilization, obstacles for and requirements of selected PRMs are collected in “go-along” interviews together with findings from the literature are integrated to develop a geospatial network analytic model of the indoor- and outdoor spaces of Austrian federal railway stations. The model and its derivatives are exposing the differences in accessibility and additional costs of spatial movement, especially in urban and rural stations. The data integration and conception of a routable network dataset is the elementary step to perform the analysis at hand. The attributes are selected based on the expert interviews and own assessments in the sample train stations. Based on the network dataset, three sample models are set up to compare accessibility differences depending on the degree of physical mobility, which are non-restricted, partly- and completely immobile. The model and data source limitations are discussed in detail and actions for improvements are derived to further develop the model and, in the future, to extend it to other train stations. With certain improvements, PRMs have more information available to plan their journey more accurately.

Roger Vickerman (p), Daniel Graham

Enormous amounts of investment have been made in high-speed rail in Europe over the past four decades. Much of the impetus for this has been the expectation that such investments will have positive impacts on economic growth and also promote regional convergence. The evidence, however, has shown varying possible impacts and this remains an area of contention.
This paper makes a contribution to this debate based on data from Spain, which has very rapidly become the largest high-speed rail network in Europe. We use data in the form of a panel for Spanish provinces over the years 1995-2013. They allow us to examine the impacts of HSR on: economic output (measured by Gross Value Added); employment; labour productivity; and number of companies.
We use two causal inference approaches: panel difference-in-differences (DiD) estimation with fixed effects, and synthetic control methods. The results show strong evidence of statistically significant positive effects from HSR investment on economic performance with the exception of that on employment. Taken together, these results indicate that HSR investment has led to an expansion of economic output, higher productivity, and a growth in the number of firms active in the economy.
Given this positive evidence of the impact of high-speed rail investment in Spain we consider the implications for appraisal methods that can be applied in other contexts. There has been little progress towards a consensus on how to include such impacts in the appraisal process for new lines so investment decisions rely more on political will than sound analysis. The emphasis here is on understanding the context of the investment, recognising that lines that link between major cities may have different impacts from those that link a first-order city with smaller cities or those between well-developed regions with good local and regional rail networks will differ from those that link a well-developed region to a less developed one.