Innovations in the appraisal of public transport projects

Abstract

Public transport is an effective tool to address multiple societal challenges, regarding mobility, sustainability and livability. When looking at typical public transport projects and traditional appraisal methods, the main type of benefits that are considered for public transport projects are passenger travel time savings, additional revenues due to increased ridership or a new fare policy and timetable savings (due to shorter trip times and less timetable hours). These current approaches provide insights into the expected performance and benefits of public transport to some extent, but they often disregard many other (positive) effects. This is partly due to a limited focus, but also due to a lack of a framework and knowledge. In this chapter, we present a framework, the 5E model, that supports the assessment of the broader benefits of public transport projects. Specifically, we show how to quantify and monetize the improvements of service reliability, robustness and crowding relief.