This report will be of interest to transportation economists and other analysts to assist them in selecting methods to conduct economic impact analyses of transit investments. Although the primary goal of public transportation investments is to improve mobility, economic benefits are also important to transit investment decisions. Consequently, it is important that reliable and defensible analytic methods are used to support decisionmaking.
Throughout the world, the use of some kind of a formal transportation project evaluation procedure is a requirement. Yet, by and large, these are partial; in fact, much weight is often placed on the initial -pre-engineering -phases of the planning process, when vital information, such as accurate costs and demand projections, is largely missing. Moreover, many of these procedures neglect to consider key issues such as project’s risks, capital costs financing, latent demand, market imperfections, labor force availability and various incompatibilities between trip rates, travel times and activity location. As a result, projects, which are judged as viable under such deficient evaluation schemes, may have had a significantly different projection of capital costs and demand should a well-founded, thorough, and efficient evaluation process be used. Against this background, this book’s main objective is to construct a comprehensive and methodical economic, planning and decision-making framework for the evaluation of proposed transportation infrastructure investment projects. Such a framework is founded on four key principles. It is based on well-established economic, transportation and policy-analysis theoretical principles; it is comprehensive enough to encompass all relevant evaluation issues; it is applicable to a wide range of transportation investment projects; and it is amenable to empirical application including a sensitivity analysis and alternative scenarios regarding urban, regional and national developments.
This synthesis report will be of interest to DOT administrators, supervisors, and staff, as well as to the consultants working with them in assessing the economic development impacts of existing or proposed transportation investments. Metropolitan Planning Organization regional and local staffs might also find it informative. It is intended to help practicing planners become aware of the range of methods and analysis techniques available, organized by the different categories of agency needs, to address different types of planning, policy, and research needs. This synthesis summarizes the current state of the practice by means of a survey of transportation planning agencies in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. This report provides reviews of the analysis methods used in recent project and program evaluation reports of these agencies, in addition to a bibliography of economic literature and guides.
This book makes a major contribution to the debate and is directed at researchers, decision makers and students who are interested in the wider economic development impacts of transport.
Report provides information about the processes that state and regional transportation decisionmakers use to analyze and select transportation infrastructure investments.
