ABSTRACT
In fields like health or education, policy programmes or local projects explicitly and directly target the welfare of citizens or seek to address specific social needs. Here evaluation is called upon to assess these needs and/or the outcomes of the intervention. Transport is most often seen as a derived demand, a service not required in itself, but simply to facilitate the meeting of other human needs. It is hence not surprising that in the field of transport planning the objectives more often than not relate to economic efficiency and/or growth, and evaluation is applied for ‘checking plans for public expenditures’ (Rus and Nash, 1997); for estimating time savings; for investigating mainly at the macro-economic level the relation between infrastructure investment and urban or regional development (cf. Banister and Lichfield, 1995); or for assessing social and environmental impacts, albeit as externalities (cf. Hoon Oum et al., 1997).The process of European integration has however changed the evaluation landscape in transport - the Transport RTD programme under the Fourth Framework Programme provides ample evidence to this (cf. Banister and Berechman, 1993; Giorgi and Pohoryles, 1998). The drive towards harmonisation has brought policy evaluation as distinct from project appraisal onto the agenda and has increased demands for ‘strategic assessments’ for checking the consistency of ‘policies, plans and programmes (P/P/P)’ or for approaching ‘the design of projects in a generic sense’ (EC, 1994; EC, 1997a; Banister and Lichfield, 1995). A recent European Initiative - the Sound and Efficient Management 2000 Programme - has sought to elaborate a framework for carrying out evaluations of Community programmes (cf. EC, 1997b; EC, 1999) and has increased awareness of the significance of the evaluation function in policy formulation and deliberation.These new demands in the field of transport evaluation arise by way of the debate on ‘sustainability’ both with respect to the environment and with respect to distributional considerations or accessibility. This is not surprising. These are issues that question the utilitarian principles that underlie the classical transport planning approach with its strong emphasis on economic efficiency. From the methodological viewpoint they also reveal the complexity of impact assessment where there is a multitude of types of impacts and impact groups and where cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness analyses are required.This book represents the first attempt in transport literature to address three key questions for evaluation raised by the afore-mentioned challenges and new demands.
