ABSTRACT
Introduction1 Over the last decade, the European Commission has commissioned a series of research programmes aimed at developing practical methodologies that allow the assessment of European large-scale transport projects. With regard to assessment methodology per se, the main effort started with the EURET Concerted Action, the main task of which was to review the project appraisal practices applied in the Union’s Member States for the different transport modes - road, railway and inland waterway - and to recommend appropriate steps towards the establishment of a co-ordinated European assessment methodology. EURET was followed by the APAS programme which continued this methodological effort. In the Fourth Framework Research Programme, the EUNET/SASI consortium - composed largely of research teams that had participated in EURET and APAS - initiated some experimental implementation of methodologies. EUNET made a remarkable effort of gathering and deriving comparable data which could be used in the assessment of international projects inside and outside the Union, it proposed operational solutions among competing methodologies, and it applied these to demonstration case studies.EUNET, as much as its predecessors APAS and EURET, was mainly concerned with the efficiency aspect of transport initiatives. Their strategic policy relevance and implications were tackled by two other projects, namely TENASSESS and CODE-TEN which together developed a method
for strategic transport assessment and applied this to several corridor investment programmes.In this paper I reflect on the choices and options made in applied research for the purpose of developing an operational assessment methodology. To do this I rely on the knowledge and experience gained through marginal participation in some of the aforementioned projects or programmes. I should make it clear at the outset that my purpose in this paper is not to evaluate these research projects. Rather, I use them as references to exemplify specific issues of importance for transport evaluation.The first part of the paper reviews the progressive evolution of project appraisal and discusses the question of whether cost-benefit analysis (CBA) - as a method of valuing project outcomes in money values rather than in utilities - should not indeed be our first choice of an evaluation methodology when budget constraints are relevant. To answer this question I review in the first section the basic principles of cost-benefit analysis and compare these to present practices. Next, I examine how multicriteria analysis (MCA) is used in the context of the assessment of transport initiatives. Finally, in the third section I discuss the evolution from decision-making analysis to a decision-support approach. The latter aims at providing a framework for group decision making and negotiation rather than a selection of the best projects.The second part (fourth section) examines whether the uncertainty which characterises a project outcome should not receive more attention than what it currently does in appraisal practice. I review a number of methods which have been proposed to handle uncertainty, and, lastly, propose a method to transform utilities in equivalent money values which allows an estimation of risk premiums.The final part (fifth section) discusses the problems presented by wider range criteria like spatial accessibility, social cohesion, strategic economic development, employment and environmental effects which are introduced in several assessment methodologies, as in EUNET and CODE-TEN.The conclusions will recap the main line of the argument followed in the paper, focusing on money valuation, assessment of uncertainty and the problems of wider ranging criteria.
