Mismatches between forecasted and actual costs and traffic figures are common in transport investments, especially in large scale ones, and so are delusions on future demand. High-speed rail project are often among the worst practices for cost overruns and demand overestimation, even where traffic figures may tell a history of apparent success. In the paper, we analyse two significant cases of delusion of success, namely Italian and Spanish HSR programmes. The Italian one shows excellent demand performances, but is among the continental worst cases for construction costs. The Spanish one, recognised worldwide as one of the most successful cases, is the one where potential demand estimations was systematically neglected and the planned network appears largely out-of-scale compared to actual traffic. The two cases show that the core of the problem does not lay in the wrong estimations of costs and demand, but on deliberate choices of overinvestment, overdesign and overquality.

No abstract

No abstract

Decisions on transport plans and projects involve relevant public investments and may also determine radical changes in users’ costs. Unfortunately, it is not rare that—especially at the strategic planning stage—decisions on alternative projects or scenarios are made on a qualitative basis or, at best, by setting some indicators and verifying how much they reach the politically decided targets (e.g., “increasing the use of bicycles by 10%”). In order to reduce subjectivity, a more quantitative and comprehensive approach to the evaluation is needed. A Cost-Benefit Analysis is a tool commonly used to assess public expenditure, but its application to mobility plans introduces further practical and theoretical complexities. In this paper, we will thus try to contribute to the topic of the assessment of both sustainable mobility transport plans and infrastructure projects by presenting the operative application of a CBA methodology that is, at the same time, theoretically coherent and rich in outputs to support the decision-maker. Moreover, we will discuss the possible use of GIS software in order to provide to the decision-makers a clear and immediate “picture” of the effects on the network linked to different scenarios. The structure is as follows. Firstly, we discuss the complexities involved in the evaluation of plans with respect to a single infrastructure. Secondly, we introduce the available approaches for the assessment of consumer surplus, namely, the Rule of Half and the logsum function method, which allow the perfect integration between CBA and transport models. Thirdly, we present, through some operative case studies, the methodologies applied to the assessment and the network effects visualization of the urban mobility plan and new infrastructures. Finally, we underline how we can make the results more understandable to politicians, policy-makers, stakeholders, and citizens and in general improve the transparency and the awareness of the choices.

In order to promote an effective level of coordination between physical investments, technology and soft policies in transport planning, a deep knowledge of supply and demand is desirable, if not necessary. Unlike other countries, the national scale of supply and demand for the Italian transport systems as a whole is barely known and in the case of long-distance mobility, there is not a unique quantitative and geographical description available. In this paper, we present a map regarding the Italian long-distance transport supply and generalised cost simulations, for the period 2013-2014. The information shown in the map comes from a multimodal transport model, which presents the peculiarity of using real public service timetables to simulate the entirety of the Italian long-distance transport industry. This tool enables one to map the entire transport supply and to estimate the generalised costs among any route: this also allows one to identify which transport mode is better suited to make a specific trip.ARTICLE HISTORY