The Seen and the Unseen En Scene: Visual Representations of Economics

Recent developments in economic theories of voter behavior have questioned the assumption that voters are rational. This paper analyzes how visual representation—in media and in thought—can engender misconceptions about political economy and preclude remedies to these misconceptions. I review Michael Moore's 1989 comedy-documentary Roger and Me, which treats layoffs at General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan, as well as "The Broken Window" from Frederic Bastiat's essay "The Seen and the Unseen." I argue linear narrative and the use of images as evidence undermine the consideration of the opportunity costs and widely-distributed effects of economic phenomena and thereby enhance the case for make-work

ChatGPT for GTFS: Benchmarking LLMs on GTFS Understanding and Retrieval

The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) standard for publishing transit data is ubiquitous. GTFS being tabular data, with information spread across different files, necessitates specialized tools or packages to retrieve information. Concurrently, the use of Large Language Models(LLMs) for text and information retrieval is growing. The idea of this research is to see if the current widely adopted LLMs (ChatGPT) are able to understand GTFS and retrieve information from GTFS using natural language instructions without explicitly providing information. In this research, we benchmark OpenAI's GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 LLMs which are the backbone of ChatGPT. ChatGPT demonstrates a reasonable understanding of GTFS by answering 59.7% (GPT-3.5-Turbo) and 73.3% (GPT-4) of our multiple-choice questions (MCQ) correctly. Furthermore, we evaluated the LLMs on information extraction tasks using a filtered GTFS feed containing four routes. We found that program synthesis techniques outperformed zero-shot approaches, achieving up to 93% (90%) accuracy for simple queries and 61% (41%) for complex ones using GPT-4 (GPT-3.5-Turbo).Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures, 1 table, Public Transpor

Bus Stop Spacings Statistics: Theory and Evidence

Transit agencies have been removing a large number of bus stops, but discussions around the bus stop spacings exhibit a lack of clarity and data for comparison. This paper proposes new terminology and concepts for statistical consideration of stop spacings, and introduces a python package and open-source database which uses General Transit Feed Specification data to derive real-world stop spacing distributionsComment: 18 pages, 5 tables, 7 figure

Track E Implementation Science, Health Systems and Economics

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138412/1/jia218443.pd

Inclusionary Zoning in a Monocentric City

To show how inclusionary zoning alters development, the author finds the most profitable housing design to build on vacant lots at each location in a monocentric city under different regulatory regimes. Section 1 sets up the model by specifying renter's preferences, geography and building parameters. Section 2 solves the developer's profit-maximization problem at each location under each regime. Finally, in Section 3, a numerical simulation confirms the effects predicted by theory and gives a picture of their magnitude

How minimum parking requirements make housing more expensive

A growing consensus argues that minimum parking requirements (MPRs) make housing more expensive. This paper examines two claims from this discussion: (1) that MPRs discourage the construction of small units; (2) that the costs of building required parking are "passed on" to buyers and renters in the form of higher prices and rents. However, the mechanisms behind these two effects have never been made explicit in the literature. This paper proposes, for each claim, a plausible mechanism relying on the specific choices of housing suppliers and consumers. We propose that MPRs discourage small units because they eliminate the most profitable floorspace/parking bundle to supply to relatively lower-income households. We propose that parking costs may be passed on by reducing the supply of housing on offer at a given price

Aspatial models of zone pricing and parking

It is often practical to collapse spatial information about a transportation system into aggregate variables related by an aspatial model---that is, a model in which individual interactions and directions of travel are not explicitly accounted for. This dissertation brings aspatial modelling to bear on two topics: downtown congestion pricing, referred to as ``zone pricing,'' and parking policy. Regarding zone pricing, a survey of the history of zone pricing shows that all existing systems fail to toll vehicles according to their use of the downtown network. To explore whether it would be advantageous to charge higher tolls to travelers who travel farther within the network, a static traffic model with probabalistic choice and variable trip lengths is proposed. Distance-based tolling turns out to be more socially efficient than charging all travelers the same price, but it leaves drivers themselves worse off since most of the welfare gains are converted to toll revenues for the government.Regarding parking, the thesis considers the idea of a ``feedback loop'' among landowners' uncoordinated decisions about how much off-street parking to provide on their parcels, when parking competes with floorspace as a use of land. One landowners' decision affects others' via two opposing channels. First, crowding: when there is too little off-street parking, on-street parking becomes crowded, making off-street parking relatively more valuable. Second, accessibility: when floorspace takes the place of off-street parking, the neighborhood becomes walkable through its higher density, making floorspace more valuable. A stylized model of development decision-making shows that each force leads to positive or negative feedback, resulting in multiple equilibria and counterintuitive results from policy

Inclusionary Zoning in a Monocentric City

To show how inclusionary zoning alters development, the author finds the most profitable housing design to build on vacant lots at each location in a monocentric city under different regulatory regimes. Section 1 sets up the model by specifying renter's preferences, geography and building parameters. Section 2 solves the developer's profit-maximization problem at each location under each regime. Finally, in Section 3, a numerical simulation confirms the effects predicted by theory and gives a picture of their magnitude

Winners and losers from road pricing with heterogeneous travelers and a mixed-traffic bus alternative

Studies of road pricing in which the Value of Time (VOT) varies among travelers suggest that road pricing benefits travelers with high VOT and hurts travelers with low VOT. This happens because, when a toll reduces congestion, only high-VOT travelers value the time saved more than the money cost. This paper uses a static traffic model with elastic demands to examine how the presence of a mixed-traffic (one affected by congestion) bus alternative, which is cheaper but slower than driving, alters that logic. When “agents” (potential travelers) care only about the time and money costs of each alternative, it turns out that Pareto-improving toll increases are possible; and, absent a Pareto improvement, the “Full Cost of Travel” (inclusive of time and money costs) rises only inside an intermediate interval of VOT while falling for sufficiently high and low VOT. But when agents have heterogeneous “tastes” for each mode, the Full Cost of Travel falls for all agents with VOT higher than a certain level, and below that level the direction of change depends on an agent’s taste

Zone Pricing in Theory and Practice

Amid growing recognition of the costs of downtown congestion and scarcity of revenues for new roads, congestion pricing for downtown areas -- a practice we call “zone pricing” -- has begun to receive wide attention. From 1975-2003, zone pricing failed to spread beyond Singapore, but by the 2000’s technological advances had made the practice more widely practical. Now London, Stockholm, Milan and Gothenburg have schemes of their own, and zone pricing is on the agenda in many world cities. The research summarized in this report has sought to advance practical knowledge of zone pricing in several ways. First, we have created a very detailed, scholarly history of zone pricing, covering the circumstances under which cities have implemented zone pricing, what technologies have been used and what results these cities have obtained. Second, we investigated the theory of “usage tolls.” A drawback of all tradition zone pricing systems is that, for practical reasons, they fail to charge different tolls to drivers who use the network to different degrees: someone who enters the downtown and immediately parks pays the same toll as someone who circles for an hour. But with new technology it will be possible to charge drivers for some index of road use, such as how far or how long they travel inside the network. Our research highlights two major advantages of usage tolling: (i) it can reschedule trips in optimal ways; (ii) it can discourage long trips -- such as those traveling across the downtown between points outside -- from happening by car in the first place. In both cases, an interesting result is the added precision of usage tolls means congestion reduction can be accomplished while charging drivers relatively little. We cite this as a political advantage that will help make zone pricing more palatable