Social and distributional impacts in transport project appraisals

Abstract

Governments are involved in transport policy and planning in many ways. Quite often, policy makers want to make decisions that are informed by the expected positive and negative impacts of transport policy options. Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is the most widely used appraisal method to inform policy makers about impacts of transport policies and projects. CBA is grounded in welfare economics, which provides strict procedures guiding the criteria/impacts to be considered in the analysis and the weighting of impacts. The rigor of CBA is considered to be a strength of the method, but both academics and practitioners find it problematic that CBAs degrade or ignore social, ethical (and to a lesser extent, environmental) dimensions of transport policies. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a review of the literature with regard to: (1) critiques of the way that social and ethical dimensions of transport are (not) included in CBA; (2) developments in the literature aiming to better include such dimensions in CBA or related appraisal methods grounded in welfare economics; (3) discussion of the way that social and ethical dimensions of transport are included in other appraisal methods such as Sustainability Assessment, Multicriteria Analysis (MCA) and Social Impact Assessment (SIA).