Stephan Heblich, Stephen Redding and Daniel Sturm write on how Railways shaped City of London:
In new research, we use the mid-19th century transport revolution from the invention of steam railways, a newly created, spatially disaggregated dataset for Greater London from 1801-1921, and a quantitative urban model to provide new evidence on the contribution of the separation of workplace and residence to agglomeration (Heblich et al. 2018). The key idea behind our approach is that the slow travel times achievable by human or horse power implied that most people lived close to where they worked when these were the main modes of transportation. In contrast, the invention of steam railways dramatically reduced the time taken to travel a given distance, increasing average travel speeds from around 6 mph for horse-drawn vehicles and 3 mph for walking to around 21 mph, which permitted the first large-scale separation of workplace and…
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