QUETRANSPORT: Interactive transport and spatial-equilibrium simulator
Webtool: This webtool provides a HTML frontend for the QUETRANSPORT GutHub toolkit, which in turn builds on the ARSW2015 toolkit (© Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Stephen J. Redding, Daniel M. Sturm and Nikolaus Wolf) and the AAB-PL toolkit (© Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Thilo N. H. Albers and Kristian Behrens). Please cite
Ahlfeldt, Redding, Sturm, Wolf (2015): The Economics of Density: Evidence from the Berlin Wall, Econometrica 83(6), p. 21272189 (for the model)
Ahlfeldt, Albers, Behrens (2026): Prime locations, American Economic Review: Insights, 8(3):374-92 (for the data)
when using the toolkit or referring to any generated results by the toolkit.
Usage: Build your own urban counterfactual in minutes. You can select among all US MSAs or 125 Global Cities covered by the AAB-PL toolkit, Select an AABPL grid for a global city or US metropolitan area. Draw a new transport line, and optionally add stations or an existing network. Draw a polygon to change local productivity, amenities or housing supply. QUETRANSPORT then computes general-equilibrium effects on population, employment, wages, rents, output and land values by grid cell—directly in your browser and in near real time. You can set travel speeds and upload a baseline transport network and draw place-based changes in fundamentals.
Limitation: The webtool inherits the full functionality from the GitHub toolkit. To ensure fast convergence, the maximum number of locations is limited to 1,000. You will have to choose a sufficiently large grid cell size (squares or hexagons) to stay within this limit. For applications to larger grids or real-world geographies, please refer to the QUETRANSPORT GutHub toolkit.