Discussion Paper 423 'Housing Market Effects of a Railroad Tunneling: Evidence from a quasi-experiment'

5 Figure 1: The quality of the public space - The situation before and after tunneling Since the 1980s, the passengers’ use of railroads in the Netherlands gradually increased, which induced the Dutch Railroad company to explore opportunities to expand the number of railroad tracks in Delft (Nederlandse Spoorwegen, 1988). [...] Residents at either sides of the railroad were unable to see past the railroad and as such, the railroad was the epitome of the urban fabric barrier between the west and east side of Delft. [...] In practice, the method achieves this by the minimization of the distance between the 1 ∗ ? ? vector of pre-tunneling characteristics of Delft ? ? 1? ? and the (? ? ∗ ? ? ) matrix of the ? ? = 1, … ,? ? pre- tunneling characteristics of the synthetic control (? ? 0). [...] The largest (Euclidean) distance of a dwelling from the railroad at the western side of the city is 1700 meter, while the largest (Euclidean) distance is 1500 meter for the eastern side the city. [...] For instance, it could be that the effects on the willingness to pay are stronger at the area that initially would be labelled as the ‘wrong side of the track’ – the area at the west of the railroad in Figure 3.