The Second Transportation Student Research Symposium
Abstract Detail
| Name | School | Title of presentation |
| Brenda K. Hugot | BU | Highway Development Corridors: Evidence of Growth Effects for US Interstate Highways |
| The highway development corridor is a well-worn notion in regional development studies but one for which there has been relatively little empirical verification. This paper describes results on an analysis of eight corridors defined by U.S. Interstate Highways. The analysis has three major components. The first is application of a gravity model to test whether each corridor acts as a functional region, where freight movements are disproportionately channeled along the corridor. Then a simple shift-share analysis is used to see whether the development patterns of counties within the corridors differ from those of non-corridor counties both in terms of total employment growth and the industrial composition of growth. Finally, we examine the county level patterns within the corridors to see whether employment growth is concentrated in urban counties or whether the highway acts to spread growth to non-metropolitan counties in the corridor. We find that economic development is realized to very different degrees across study corridors. Results suggest that frameworks for considering the economic consequences of corridor transport investments should explicitly consider contextual factors such as regional location, inherited industrial structure, and stocks of different forms of capital. |
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