The impact of availability of bike sharing systems on rental housing price in Japanese regional cities

Abstract

Bike sharing systems (BSS) have gained attention as a convenient and sustainable transportation mode. In this study we conducted a generalized propensity score analysis to estimate the impact of availability of BSS on house rental price based on a hedonic approach. We evaluated the convenience of each BSS station based on the average number of available bikes and calculated a BSS availability indicator (BAI) as a treatment variable. As the output of several steps of the generalized propensity score analysis, the function of potential outcome at each BAI level was estimated. Results show that the increase in BAI leads to an increase of house rental prices compared with housing units without available BSS up to a certain BAI value.