This thesis studies the interaction of passenger car traffic and the economy. Finnish law requires a cost benefit -calculation for government-financed infrastructure investments. For this reason, the economic models and literature to model the interactions of infrastructure and the economy has been in high demand in Finland.
The literature review in this thesis looks at traffic economics through the dynamics of congestion, the value of time savings and methods to utilize these valuations in the form of road toll schemes. The literature review also looks at the housing and labour market out-comes from infrastructure investments. To finish off the literature review, there’s a compre-hensive study of literature around the data used in this study and how it has been utilized.
This literature review generates an understanding of the past and current affairs of how traffic data is used in analysing the economy and what kind of avenues exist to evaluate the impact of transportation infrastructure. These are mainly: population, labour market out-comes, housing market prices and travel demand.
The analysis seeks to validate the use of traffic data as a split dataset between work and leisure times. The literature shows a clear difference in time values and behavior in different types of travel demand. The raw data from Finnish Traffic and Infrastructure Agency is vali-dated and analyzed with simple OLS regressions with different economic variables.
There are distinct differences in work and leisure-time traffic. The split also makes models perform a lot better and when combined they make the models perform very well. However, as the analysis studies all the municipalities along the E18, the analysis ends up showing the differences between municipalities in stead of causal effects of the E18 to local municipalities during the study period.
The analysis finds multiple ways to use and develop the model and how a single piece of infrastructure can be modeled better. These better models can then be utilized in analyzing the efficacy of infrastructure investments with higher precision
