Regional transport accessibility and housing market dynamics: the case study of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area

There has been a growing interest in land value capture as a means of funding investments in transport infrastructure (TI), as reported in a vast literature analysing the relationship between sales prices and accessibility provided by TI in general and transit specifically. There has, however, been limited research on the role of network-level regional transport accessibility and the intra-regional spatial heterogeneity of the price effects. Furthermore, studies usually focus on one transportation mode, disregarding the multi-modal competition, and are mostly cross-sectional or pooled cross-sectional/time series analyses which do not reflect the dynamic nature of developments in TI and housing markets. To address these gaps, this paper empirically investigates the roles of local and regional transport accessibility by car and transit on the evolution of sales prices of detached houses from 2001 to 2016, across different geographical contexts while controlling for an extensive list of other determinants in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). The spatial panel models’ results confirm that regional transport accessibility does indeed play a significant role in sales prices, with variations between transit and car and over the rural-urban spectrum, over and above the local proximity to TI, which needs to be accounted for in land value capture policies.