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NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

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The models developed for this Handbook and by others are not IS of course completely perfected. The industrial location models ’ iJ ■ presently available are rough approximations of reality, and are especially weak in their portrayal of business services — activities which are especially important in New York. There is also undoubtedly room for improved behavioral representations of the demand for housing, retail trade facilities, and transport service together with more complete representations of the economic and policy behavior of suppliers and regulators of these activities. All of this background may seem somewhat excessive for an understanding of the relatively simple things which are done in the current modeling effort presented in this Handbook. Basically, NYREG portrays the present system of linkages which determines activity in the Manhattan Central Business District- This system is then perturbed by postulating transport changes. These can be small or large, and as numerous as desired. These changes result in changes in the time and cost of travel from work to home and from home to shop. In response, people rearrange their trips by changing their choices about where to live and where to shop. This results in new competition for land and buildings, and changes their prices and rents, leading to additional changes in behavior, and so on. The great advantage of the equilibrium formulation in NYREG is that all the interactions in the system — resulting from changes in location, changes in costs, and competition for space — are traced out to a final complete readjustment, which would actually result from thousands and millions of small accomodations, perhaps spread out over considerable time. The outcome of the equilibration is a new pattern of rents for land and buildings. new patterns of location, new patterns of transport utilization — and consequently new patterns of welfare for households and profitability for businesses. These results are available in considerable detail, and in summary form. These methods, theoretical and abstruse though they might seem at first glance, are in fact intensely practical. They are easily computable, they use data which is in general readily available, and they produce results which are reasonable, plausible, and explainable. The results are at the same time far from being predictable by common-sense methods or classical economics, and require models of this kind for their production. These models are derived from similar efforts which have been used in a number of applications to analyze the possibility of "value capture" for transport improvements in large metropolitan areas. However, the advantages do not end here. We know from experience with these models that work can be extended to the entire Tri-State Region and disaggregated to reflect both the choice of more types of housing and access to more types of

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NYC-WTC_000187747