As one of the most rapidly growing economies, China has been experiencing pressing environmental and urban challenges due to a dramatic increase in fossil fuel consumption, and a lack of stringent and well-enforced environmental regulations. To address problems such as air pollution, traffic congestion, and weak enforcement, China has issued extensive environmental and transportation regulations. My dissertation aims to empirically estimate the causal effects of environmental policies and public infrastructures on environmental outcomes. The dissertation is comprised of three chapters. Chapter 1, joint with Shanjun Li, Yanyan Liu, and Avralt Od-Purejav, estimates the impact of subway expansions on air quality by leveraging fine-scale air quality data and the rapid build-out of 14 new subway lines in Beijing from 2008 to 2016. Chapter 2 is a review article, joint with Shanjun Li, Jianwei Xing, and Fan Zhang, which reviews findings in the recent literature on the impacts of a host of urban transportation policies used in developed- and developing-country settings. Finally, Chapter 3 studies the role of accurate measurements in effective regulations. Using high-resolution satellite-based pollution measures, this chapter examines local governments' strategic pollution control behavior and its implications on dynamic representativeness based on the staggered roll-out of the air pollution monitoring system in China.