Abstract
Sustainable public transport systems may be achieved by adopting electric bus locomotion. The problem being addressed by this research is the development and case application of a computation methodology of the social benefit cost ratio of an electric bus transport project in India and identification of whether it can significantly favour the situation of environment friendly transport. The underlying theory behind this approach is if the environmental and social dimensions of an infrastructure project are considered in addition to the financial dimensions for the purpose of project appraisal, a holistic evaluation can be achieved and such an evaluation can give an edge to the approval of environmentally friendly projects. The evaluation has been performed using the present worth analysis of various types of benefits and costs associated with the implementation of the electric bus rapid transit system in a city. The variables considered in the researched methodology are benefits which are revenue, savings in vehicle operating costs (VOC), environmental benefits, savings in travel time, reduction in accidents and non-consumption of fossil fuel, and costs which are infrastructure investment costs, cost of the bus fleet, maintenance cost, replacement costs, cost of system operation and maintenance and additional electric power generation. The outcome as indicated by the value of the social benefit-cost ratio (SBCR) illustrates that such projects can be positively justified from point of view of the benefits gained by the society as well as fruitful returns and value addition of infrastructure investment in the long run. The research contributes by validating that social benefit-cost analysis (SBCA) can be used for the evaluation of sustainable transport system appraisals in order to make their realisation more favourable.
Highlights
Electric vehicles as opposed to fossil fuel based vehicles have no tailpipe emissions and if the electricity is generated from renewable sources, the source emissions can be reduced
The methodology for computation of social benefit-cost ratio (SBCR) involves the identification of the benefits or positive effects as well as the costs or negative implications, which may be associated with the development of an electric bus rapid transit system (e-bus rapid transport system (BRTS))
The study addresses and evaluates various costs and benefits for the case of e-BRTS for Ahmedabad with special efforts to account for the benefits due to the reduction in noise pollution and the costs for power generation which have been neglected by most other studies in the similar domain
Summary
Electric vehicles as opposed to fossil fuel based vehicles have no tailpipe emissions and if the electricity is generated from renewable sources, the source emissions can be reduced. There are considerable efforts being done in the present era to shift the fossil fuel vehicle scenario to electric vehicle scenario. The expression has come in various forms such as reported targets of electric vehicle shift, enabling policies, indigenous manufacturing and approval of electric buses and other research and. For transportation systems project appraisals, the environmental and social aspects are often neglected, due to which justice is not done to values other than financial, rendering the projects non-feasible even though it may have intangible benefits (Florio and Sirtori, 2016). The social and environmental aspects of the transportation systems are often neglected because objective evaluation of these intangible aspects is a grey area and monetisation of these aspects is not standardised in India, as it is in other countries like the United Kingdom (Hickman and Dean, 2017)
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