Land value appraisal in an area with a future tramway project in Lille, France

As it is widely accepted, large scale transportation projects have a significant impact both in the areas around its stations, and in a regional level at different topics of urban environment. For example, a new transport infrastructure may produce changes on the real estate market. Many times, these changes are analyzed using hedonic models. This study measures the actual impact of urban transportation on the real estate market in an area where a future large-scale transportation project -two new tramway lines- will run. In this analysis we evaluate the effects of transportation while accounting for a number of structural, location and neighborhood variables making use of a location-detailed time series dataset. We explore if there are significant land price changes due to the current public/private transportation characteristics of the area and discuss what may have happened due to the so-called “announcement or anticipation effect”. As a case study, it is analyzed the region of the bassin minier of Nord-Pasde- Calais in France. It is a deprived region which decades ago, used to be a pole of mining activities. The Transport Authority in the region is the SMT Artois-Gohelle and it has planned to build in the near future two new tramway lines that will improve the accessibility in the region that are not exempt of polemic.