Abstract

We study the impact of investments on urban highways and subway stations on a city's structural density. We use data from Santiago, Chile, to analyze the effect of the inauguration of six urban highways and several subway stations in the mid-2000s on built-up land. We use as treatment the variation in a network-based accessibility index that controls for the non-random location of transport infrastructure. Results show that the opening of urban highways increases surface built by 1.72 percent five years after the inauguration of highways. The effects of urban highways on residential and industrial land use are also positive and statistically significant, with increases of 1.64 and 1.55 percent respectively. For housing and industrial land use, the effect of an expansion of urban highways increases with changes in the accessibility of subways, suggesting complementary effects of improvement in infrastructures on surface built. For commerce and services, the joint impact of the expansion of highways and subways is negative, indicating a crowding-out effect between urban transport infrastructures