Measuring the WTP for shopping facilities around railway stations

Abstract

Railway stations often function as a nexus of various activities, such as transport, shopping and working. Larger stations especially act as nodes for several transport modes, including heavy rail, light rail and city bus transport. Therefore, it is precisely due to their strategic and accessible locations that specific railway stations increasingly become more attractive for the location of firms. Because station areas potentially act as magnets for service sector firms (particularly) and in combination with increased traffic density, these areas also attract many smaller facilitative firms, such as shops, childcare centres, and restaurants. This situation leads to a variety of (Marshallian) localised external economies of scale; examples of railway stations that have induced such economies of scale are the high-speed railway station in Lille, Gare Montparnasse in Paris, Broadgate in London, Lehrter Bahnhof in Berlin, and the train-metro-tram station Zuidas in Amsterdam. At present, the area around the latter is witnessing a rapid transformation towards a completely new central business district (CBD) (for more details, see Rodenburg 2005).