Current Practices For Assessing Economic Development Impacts From Transportation Investments

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.

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 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.

Ex-post evaluation is important to improving the delivery of transport policy objectives. It can be used for multiple purposes at the core of which is the improvement of ex-ante assessment. A small number of jurisdictions employ ex-post evaluation systematically and leading experience is ...

This pioneering text provides a holistic approach to decisionmaking in transportation project development and programming, whichcan help transportation professionals to optimize their investmentchoices. The authors present a proven set of methodologies forevaluating transportation projects that ensures that all costs andimpacts are taken into consideration. The text's logical organization gets readers started with asolid foundation in basic principles and then progressively buildson that foundation. Topics covered include: Developing performance measures for evaluation, estimatingtravel demand, and costing transportation projects Performing an economic efficiency evaluation that accounts forsuch factors as travel time, safety, and vehicle operatingcosts Evaluating a project's impact on economic development and landuse as well as its impact on society and culture Assessing a project's environmental impact, including airquality, noise, ecology, water resources, and aesthetics Evaluating alternative projects on the basis of multipleperformance criteria Programming transportation investments so that resources can beoptimally allocated to meet facility-specific and system-widegoals Each chapter begins with basic definitions and concepts followedby a methodology for impact assessment. Relevant legislation isdiscussed and available software for performing evaluations ispresented. At the end of each chapter, readers are providedresources for detailed investigation of particular topics. Theseinclude Internet sites and publications of international anddomestic agencies and research institutions. The authors alsoprovide a companion Web site that offers updates, data foranalysis, and case histories of project evaluation and decisionmaking. Given that billions of dollars are spent each year ontransportation systems in the United States alone, and that thereis a need for thorough and rational evaluation and decision makingfor cost-effective system preservation and improvement, this textshould be on the desks of all transportation planners, engineers,and educators. With exercises in every chapter, this text is anideal coursebook for the subject of transportation systems analysisand evaluation.