Wednesday, March 18, 2026 12:30 - 14:00

This event is both online and in person.

SAL 1.04, 1st Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH

Online participants are welcome:
Please sign up to our mailinglist (seminar_macroiep) to receive event updates and a link to the seminar online.

About this event

Which Americans experience the worst infrastructure? What are the costs of living with that infrastructure? We measure road roughness throughout America using vertical acceleration data from Uber rides across millions of American roads. Our measure correlates strongly and positively with other measures of road roughness where they are available, negatively with driver speed. We find that road repair events decrease roughness and increase speeds. We measure drivers? willingness-to-pay to avoid roughness by measuring how speeds change with salient changes in road roughness, such as those associated with town borders and road repaving events in Chicago. These estimates suggest that one standard deviation of road roughness in the US generates losses to drivers of 33 cents per driver-mile. Roads are worse near coasts, and in poorer towns and in poorer neighborhoods, even within towns. We find that a household that drives 3,000 miles annually on predominantly local roads will suffer $318 per year more in driving pain if they live in a predominantly Black neighborhood than in a predominantly White neighborhood. Road roughness modestly predicts subsequent road resurfacing in four of eleven cities, which suggests that repaving is only weakly targeted towards damaged roads.

Participants are expected to adhere to the CEP Events Code of Conduct.

Directions

This event will take place in SAL 1.04, 1st Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH.

Online participants are welcome:
Please sign up to our mailinglist (seminar_macroiep) to receive event updates and a link to the seminar online.

The building is labelled SAL on the LSE campus map. You can also find us on Google Maps. For further information, go to contact us.

Trade and Urban Seminars are part of the CEP's Trade programme and Urban programme.