As many cities are investing in street improvement or transportation infrastructure upgrade projects to provide better bike access or more complete bike networks, the economic value of bike infrastructure and bike facilities remains an area where many practitioners, planners and policy makers are seeking more conclusive evidence. Using residential property values as indicators of consumer preferences for bicycle infrastructure, many scholars have shown the importance of greenspaces and off-street bike trails as valuable amenities to property owners. However, empirical evidence regarding the relationship of on-street bike facilities and property values remains relatively inconsistent.

This study unique focuses on advanced bike facilities which represent higher levels of bike priority or bike infrastructure investments that have been shown to be more desirable to a larger portion of the population. Estimating ordinary least squares hedonic pricing models and spatial autoregressive hedonic models separately for single and multi-family properties, we find that proximity to advanced bike facilities (measured by distance) has significant and positive effects on all property values, highlighting household preferences for high quality bike infrastructure. Furthermore, we also show that the extensiveness of the bike network (measured by density) is a positive and statistically significant contributor to the property prices for all property types, even after controlling for proximity to bike facilities and other property, neighborhood and transaction characteristics. Finally, estimated coefficients are applied to assess property value impacts of a proposed Portland “Green Loop” signature bike infrastructure concept, illustrating the importance of considering both accessibility and extensiveness of bike facility networks.

This research is funded as part of the Portland Climate Action Collaborative, a research partnership between Portland State University’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions (ISS) and Portland Bureau of Portland Sustainability (BPS). Many thanks to Joseph Broach, who provided us with bicycle infrastructure data.