Cost-benefit analysis has become a widely used and well developed tool for evaluation of suggested transport projects. This paper presents our view of the role and position of CBA in a transport planning process, partly based on a brief survey of a number of countries where CBA plays a formalised role in decision making. The survey shows that methodologies, valuations and areas of application are broadly similar across countries. All countries place the CBA results in a comprehensive assessment framework that also includes various types of non-monetised benefits. An important advantage with using CBA is that it is a way to overcome cognitive, structural and process-related limitations and biases in decision making. Some of the main challenges to CBA and to quantitative assessment in general lie in the institutional and political context. There is often a risk that CBA enters the planning process too late to play any meaningful role. This risk seems to increase when planning processes are centred around a perceived problem . If the problem is perceived as important enough, even inefficient solutions may be viewed as better than nothing, despite that the definition of what constitutes a problem is often arbitrary

This paper provides an overview of the study 'Provision of market research for value of time savings and reliability' undertaken by the Arup/ITS Leeds/Accent consortium for the UK Department for Transport (DfT). The paper summarises recommendations for revised national average values of in-vehicle travel time savings, reliability and time-related quality (e.g. crowding and congestion), which were developed using willingness-to-pay (WTP) methods, for a range of modes, and covering both business and non-work travel purposes. The paper examines variation in these values by characteristics of the traveller and trip, and offers insights into the uncertainties around the values, especially through the calculation of confidence intervals. With regards to non-work, our recommendations entail an increase of around 50% in values for commute, but a reduction of around 25% for other non-work-relative to previous DfT 'WebTAG' guidance. With regards to business, our recommendations are based on WTP, and thus represent a methodological shift away from the cost saving approach (CSA) traditionally used in WebTAG. These WTP-based business values show marked variation by distance; for trips of less than 20 miles, values are around 75% lower than previous WebTAG values; for trips of around 100 miles, WTP-based values are comparable to previous WebTAG; and for longer trips still, WTP-based values exceed those previously in WebTAG.

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Valuing transport investments based on travel time savings-a response to David Metz. Case Studies on Transport Policy, 6 (4). pp. 638-641.

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