Assessment of the influence due to a new metro line on the promotion of business activities around the stations: A case study of MetroSur in Madrid

Abstract

The construction of a new public transportation infrastructure in a metropolitan area has a great impact, in many different ways, on the neighborhoods surrounding the stations. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the influence that the construction of a new metro line has on the promotion of businesses (shops, offices and so on) near the stations. To that end, we have analyzed, as a case study, the construction of the new metro line, “Metrosur”, in Alcorcon, a municipality at the south east of Madrid. The analysis was carried out through two different approaches: on one hand, we used a “point pattern analysis” to estimate kernel surfaces to analyze the variation in the density of business activities during a period of ten years, from the conception of the line to four years after the line entered into operation. In the second approach, we calibrated a binary logit model to assess the probability that each location has to hold any economic activity taking into account its distance to Metrosur and other location characteristics. We found that the distance to the stations positively impacts the location of a business. Moreover, the paper demonstrates that agglomeration plays an important role in the collocation of economic activities.