Incorporating equity as part of the wider impacts in transport infrastructure assessment: an application of the SUMINI approach

Abstract

The state of the art in appraisal of transport infrastructure (particularly for developed countries) is moving towards inclusivity of a set of wider impacts than has traditionally been the case. In appraisal frameworks generally Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA) features as either an alternative to, or complementary with, Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) particularly when assessing a wider set of distributional and other impacts. In that respect it goes some way towards addressing an identified weakness in conventional CBA. This paper proposes a new method to incorporate the wider impacts into the appraisal framework (SUMINI) based upon a composite indicator and MCA. The method is illustrated for a particular example of the wider set of impacts, i.e. equity, through the ex-post assessment of two large EU transport infrastructure (TEN-T) case studies. The results suggest that SUMINI assesses equity impacts well and the case studies highlight the flexibility of the approach in reflecting different policy or project objectives. The research concludes that this method should not be viewed as being in competition with traditional CBA, but that it could be an easily adopted and complementary approach. The value in the research is in providing a new and significant methodological advance to the historically difficult question of how to evaluate equity and other wider impacts. The research is of strong international significance due to the publication of the TEN-Ts review by the European Commission, as well as the transnational nature of large scale interurban transport schemes, the involvement of national and transnational stakeholder groups in the approval and funding of those schemes, the large numbers of population potentially subject to equity and other wider impacts and the degree of variation in the regional objectives and priorities for transport decision makers.

A method to evaluate equitable accessibility: combining ethical theories and accessibility-based approaches

“…Some authors Transportation (2016) 43:473-490 479 have previously proposed the Gini coefficient or index (Gini 1936) as the basis for transport equity evaluation (e.g. see Rietveld et al 2007;Van Wee and Geurs (2011), others have proposed non-Gini-index based indicators that also use normalised scores (on a scale ranging from zero to one) (Thomopoulos and Grant-Muller 2013). We build upon those papers to present a method that shows how two (categories of) ethical theories, egalitarianism and sufficientarianism, can be explicitly linked to the Gini-index.…”

“…Most countries have adopted cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as the preferred evaluation methodology across all aspects of transport decision-making (Hayashi and Morisugi 2000;Bristow and Nellthorp 2000;Grant-Muller et al 2001; Thomopoulos and Grant-Muller 2013). However, CBA generally ignores the distribution effects of such decisions, such as how they affect different regions and/or social groups.…”

Accessibility in Cities: Transport and Urban Form

“…Fragmented governance and the lack of coordination between national and local policy frameworks for urban form and transport are widespread (Ang and Marchal 2013; IPCC 2014a); and the continued use of narrowly defined cost-benefit analysis (CBA) for transport projects (Odgaard, Kelly et al 2005;Mackie and Worsley 2013;Thomopoulos and Grant-Muller 2013) often obstructs more effective and well-coordinated transport-related investments.…”

Cost-benefit analysis in practice

“…Boadway, 2006;Campbell and Brown, 2003;Mishan, 1976), 'Incorporating distributional effects in a hybrid model which combines CBA and Multi-criteria analysis' (e.g. Thomopoulos et al, 2009;Thomopoulos and Grant Muller, 2013;) and the UK Department for Transport's WebTAG guidance on Social and Distributional Impacts, see www.dft.gov.uk/webtag/) . Subsequent to this study, we recommend considering the solution that minimizes the underexposure of distributional effects in the most efficient way in the Dutch practice, but also in other practices.…”