Upcoming seminar: New ideas in economic evaluation
Next Tuesday, the Government Economics Network and Auckland Council are hosting a seminar entitled “Economic evaluation in Auckland – new ideas and challenges“. It’s on a topic that I personally find very interesting – some readers may also be keen:
Estimating the economic impact of transport interventions using the Gross Value Added approach.…
2 Comments MoT’s review of capital spending on roads, part 2
This is the second post in a series on the Ministry of Transport’s working paper on New Zealand’s capital spending on roads, which was prepared as an input to the 2015/16 Government Policy Statement (GPS) on Land Transport Funding. It was released to Matt under the Official Information Act just before Christmas.…
Is road funding a case of “survival of the un-fittest”?
In several recent posts I’ve taken a look at people’s revealed preferences for roads (nobody’s willing to pay directly for them) and public transport, walking, and cycling (people are queuing up to get on the train). In those posts, I’ve argued that observing how people vote with their feet (or their wallets) can teach us a lot about demand for different travel modes.…
How much of a “cost” is congestion really?
Like all things in life, when it comes to transport there are always more projects being dreamed up than there is money available. So to determine just what should be built and when there needs to be some sort of prioritisation process. …
Should impact on land value be part of the cost-benefit analysis?
Submissions to the Board of Inquiry hearing of the Kapiti Expressway project have highlighted what seems to be a pretty critical hole in the cost-benefit analysis process: that the impact on land values of transport projects is simply ignored when it comes to assessing whether they stack up or not – that is whether they lead to an economic gain or not.…
The irony of government’s dismissal of CRL
The government’s rather odd dismissal of the findings of the City Centre Future Access Study (CCFAS) leave them in a relatively strange position of effectively endorsing a ‘do nothing’ scenario. There are a lot of posts to be written on the CCFAS and its supporting documentation over the next days and weeks and I won’t try to get through everything in a single post, or even 2-3 of them.…
What does the CCFAS document tell us?
Whoever leaked the draft City Centre Future Access study (CCFAS) is, as Mr Anderson said in a comment the other day, a complete and utter idiot (assuming that it’s someone from Auckland Transport rather than Central Government). After working so hard over the past year to get beyond the differences in opinion between the two parties which plagued last year’s review of the CRL’s original business case, it’s really dumb to spoil this goodwill by jumping the gun.…
Sideswipe Covers Travel Time Savings
In recent days the Herald “Sideswipe” column has helpfully illustrated some of the core issues around urban sprawl and using travel time savings as a measure of the worth of a transport project. It started with this on Monday:
Good life in the country costs less
OK, so you move out to, say, Whangaparaoa from the North Shore to get a more affordable mortgage.…
Thoughts on “Band-Aid” solutions
There are often two competing arguments when it comes to transport investment: Build the project now, you’re going to need it eventually
Only build what you need when you need to build it This is a really interesting debate, because both sides of the argument have a good point to make.…
Measuring ‘transport benefit’ better
In transport planning there’s a lot of talk about ‘cost-benefit analyses’, leading to a “BCR” (benefit cost ratio) for a particular project. Projects with a BCR of greater than 1.0 deliver more benefits than the money expended upon them (and any disbenefits the project generates) and are therefore worth considering spending money upon.…
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