Journal
RESEARCH IN TRANSPORTATION ECONOMICS
Volume 47, Issue -, Pages 3-18Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.retrec.2014.09.013
Keywords
Cost-benefit analysis; Project appraisal; Transport investments
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Cost-benefit analysis has become a widely used and well developed tool for evaluation of suggested transport projects. This paper presents our view of the role and position of CBA in a transport planning process, partly based on a survey of a number of countries where CBA plays a formalised role in decision making. The survey shows that methodologies, valuations and areas of application are broadly similar across countries. All countries place the CBA results in a comprehensive assessment framework that also includes various types of non-monetised benefits. An important advantage with using CBA is that it is a way to overcome cognitive, structural and process-related limitations and biases in decision making. Some of the main challenges to CBA and to quantitative assessment in general lie in the institutional and political context. There is often a risk that CBA enters the planning process too late to play any meaningful role. This risk seems to increase when planning processes are centred around a perceived problem. If the problem is perceived as important enough, even inefficient solutions may be viewed as better than nothing, despite that the definition of what constitutes a problem is often arbitrary. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available