Appraisal of freight projects and policies

Abstract

Freight transport systems are facing ever-growing demand and increasingly stringent requirements. Governments are pressured to develop new policies and fund new projects that drive forward the freight transport systems. We provide an overview of typical evaluation approaches used for freight transport policies and projects, from the public policy perspective. We make a simple introduction to the freight transport system, including the most representative agents and components. We introduce a basic framework, briefly reviewing some key literature on the topic and describe the salient features of the state of freight transport appraisal practice today. We also introduce the main freight transport modeling approaches that support project appraisal. We distinguish three types of freight projects according to their geographical scope—global, national and local level—as the appraisal techniques differ. Cost-Benefit Analysis is the prevalent technique in global level projects and very common in national level projects. Multicriteria Analysis type approaches dominate at the local level. Finally, we identify research challenges related to appraisal of freight transport projects and policies.