One of the most radical innovations of the last century is the invention of the automobile. Cars have completely changed the way we travel to work or undertake leisure activities. Because car travel has become cheap and fast, many people now live much further from their work than they did 50 to 100 years…

We are proud to introduce to you Jonathan Hall, transport economist, visiting Research Associate at the Department of Spatial Economics. Jonathan, originally from the United States, is also an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. He came to Amsterdam along with his lovely wife and four children for one year on account of his…

Are you paying attention? In many situations research suggests not. For example, when we buy things online, on average we respond more to the purchase price than to the shipping cost. As the total comprises the sum of both costs, this doesn’t make sense. A series of recent tests look at whether we take full…

Museum Het Valkhof starts 2022 with an interactive time travel along the Roman Via Appia, one of the oldest highways of the world. REVISITED Via Appia is the result of a longterm multidisciplinairy research cooperation between Spatial Economics GIS colleague Maurice de Kleijn, artist dr. Krien Clevis, the Netherland eScience Center, archaeologists from Radboud University…

Higher parking prices lead to a reduction in traffic congestion in Amsterdam. This is shown in recent research by Francis Ostermeijer, Hans Koster, Jos van Ommeren and Leonardo Nunes of the Vrije Universiteit. They find that the sharp price increase in 2019 has led to a 9% decrease in the number of paying policy parkers.…

MObility during and after COrona LOckDOwn (abbreviated as MOCOLODO) is a research project, addressing urgent (policy) questions about mobility in corona times. In particular, MOCOLODO aims to answer the following questions: What can we learn about mobility behaviour and its determinants during lockdown and relaxation? Based on this knowledge, how can we advise governments on…

‘Urban Dynamics – Analysing urban development dynamics and impacts’ was the title of the joint workshop organized by the Department of Spatial Economics VU and Universitas Indonesia. The workshop was part of the WINNER Event (Week of Indonesia-Netherlands Education and Research)* and took place on October 27. The rapid urbanisation process in Indonesia has resulted…

Urban car use causes problems such as congestion and environmental pollution. Pricing policy is an efficient and effective tool to reduce congestion, but there is insufficient support for taxes, and forms of remuneration are expensive. Against this background, research project U-SMILE (Urban Smart Measures and Incentives for quality of Life Enhancement*) designed and evaluated experiments…

Cities are a very old phenomenon and, argued by many, one of the greatest human inventions. By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to live in cities. The future of mankind is thus an urban one. With these words brand-new professor Hans Koster opened his inaugural lecture ‘Reinventing cities: Evaluating effective urban policies’.…

The price of CO2 is perhaps the most important price in the world, states a news article in the Dutch newspaper NRC (17 September 2021). Carolyn Fischer – professor of Environmental Economics at the Department of Spatial Economics – argues that the current price of CO2 does not include the external costs for the economy…