polityka transportowa » transport appraisal

Transport appraisal- oszacowanie kosztów transportu

This paper was a part of the HEATCO research programme- a project financed by European Union, and, as the name indicates (Harmonised European Approaches for Transport Costing and Project Assessment), intended to harmonise the costing and appraisal procedures. It cites previous studies that compared various appraisal methodologies in different countries (such as the PIARC survey, that found out in 2001/02 that the cost of a fatal injury, varied from 46,500 euro in South Africa up to 3,641,000 euro in the USA). These citied studies found that some externalities were monetised (noise in New Zealand, air pollution in Japan).

The general finding was that the national practices in the 25 researched countries (EU except for Luxembourg, but Switzerland included) showed, that the appraisal techniques are in fact limited to road transport, and to some small extent also refer to rail transport, whereas for other transport modes they are scarce. This is reflected by the fact that PC software is only used to appraise road projects.

In the Eastern countries of the EU the international guidelines (EU, EIB, and World Bank) are widely used as the base to the local appraisal practice, and the CBA is the practice often used only in the projects co-funded by EU. Besides, in 9 countries the CBA is used in connection with multi-criteria analysis (MCA).

The elements of CBA are listed. An important issue was the consideration of the deadweight loss to society that occurs due to taxation and financing of roads from taxes: such approach is used in 4 countries. Besides, the different ways of estimating the VTTS across countries are compared. The values for work time differ extremely: from €57.40 (2002, PPP, factor prices) in Austria to Hungary with value of €2.81 (2002, PPP, factor prices). The same huge differences occur for value of time for non- work related trips (from €1.4 to €21.4), or the time savings of commercial goods traffic (range from €6.8 to €46.2).

The safety externalities were also quite differently treated across countries. Finland priced the fatality (that is, a death within 30 days after the accident) as 1,941,503 € (2002, factor prices) and the lowest value was estimated in the Slovak Republic- only 197,810 per fatality (2002, €, factor prices).

With respect to noise, such measures of capturing this externality as hedonic pricing (used in all countries except for Germany) or stated preference/contingent used in the latter. The pricing of air pollution externalities (such as various types of exhaust gases) is also priced differently, and large discrepancies are the rule. The question of including the effects of climate change is also discussed. The survey also covers the problem of indirect socio-economic problems.

“CURRENT PRACTICE IN PROJECT APPRAISAL IN EUROPE”, Th. Odgaard, Ch. Kelly, J. Laird

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