How Much Road Does America Have?
New interview on Densely Speaking explores this understudied topic.
As some of you know, Jeff Lin and I co-host a podcast called Densely Speaking: Conversations about Cities, Economics & Law that consists of interviews of scholars about their work in urban economics and adjacent fields.
Today we released an interview (Apple; Spotify; direct) with Erick Guerra, a professor at the Weitzman School of Design at Penn, about his new article, Urban Roadway in America: The Amount, Extent, and Value (with Gilles Duranton and Xinyu Ma). The article quantifies roadway space (L x W) in over 300 US metros and then analyzes the economic impact and value of that space. This turns out to be a rather tricky research exercise, and in the process of doing it Erick and co-authors created a lasting public good—not just a great article distilling their findings, but a new data set for other scholars to use.
Jeff and I had a lot of fun with the conversation, which will be of interest to subscribers of this newsletter. You might consider subscribing to the podcast directly (Apple; Spotify) if you don’t already as I don’t announce every new interview here. We rarely release more than once a month, so it won’t be overwhelming.
Last thing: while we would love to do more interviews (probably the most common feedback we receive), we are capacity constrained. However, we do have a recommendations segment at the end of the show called Appendices where we flag and briefly discuss additional work. Everything is linked in the show notes.
Enjoy!
Greg