MetroScan: A Quick Scan Appraisal Capability to Identify Value Adding Sustainable Transport Initiatives

Abstract

One of the most important features of comprehensive land use and transport planning is an ability to identify candidate projects and policies that are adding value to the sustainable performance of transport networks and to the economy as a whole. Standard methods of identifying a shortlist of projects to assess are often qualitative in nature and/or influenced by prejudices of elected officials or their advisers without a systematic way of narrowing the many potential options to evaluate, in sufficient detail, a truly value-adding set. There is a case to be made for having a capability to undertake, in a timely manner, a scan of a large number of potentially worthy projects and policies that can offer forecasts of passenger and freight demand, benefit–costs ratios and economy-wide outcomes. Such a framework would then be meaningful in the sense of offering outputs that are similar to those that are the focus of assessments that are typically spread over many months, if not years, on very few projects, which may exclude those which have the greatest merit. This paper introduces MetroScan, a strategic-level transport and land use planning application system that allows for mapping of passenger and freight activity, as well as an endogenous treatment of the location of households and firms. We summarise the analytical framework of MetroScan and show its capability (including the many useful outputs) with a case study for a 25 percent reduction in public transport fares across the entire network.

Major urban transport expenditure initiatives: Where are the returns likely to be strongest and how significant is social exclusion in making the case

“…User benefit estimates are critical to assessing the economic worth of major transport initiatives, typically being the primary rationale for those initiatives. MetroScan (Hensher et al 2020) enables estimation of these benefits as increases in trip maker consumers' surplus, which represents the difference between what people would be willing to pay for the trips they make and what they actually pay, based on changes in constituent elements of generalized travel costs 4 .…”

To Relocate Or Not to Relocate: A Logit Regression Model of Factors Influencing Corporate Headquarter Relocation Decision in China

“…Consistent with Fallah et al (2014), Artz et al (2016) confirmed that the presence of well-educated workers, industrial clusters, the concentration of suppliers (upstream or downstream), and customers motivate relocation of new firms to rural areas while creating agglomerations economies. Hensher et al (2017) used a three-stage equation to establish that the effectiveness of employee density, education level, income, and accessibility were the main headquarter relocation factors. Balogun et al (2019) observed a predominant concern for investment (growth/profit), employment, education opportunities for kids, tax opportunities, and cultural richness among senior executives while making headquarter relocation decisions in Australia.…”

“…This view is consistent with current findings that central cities are prioritized as they have quality education institutions, well-educated professionals, and a high concentration of software (technical) skills (cf. Artz et al, 2016; Hensher et al, 2017; Koven & Koven, 2018). Adler and Florida (2020) recently established that human capital or talent and population size of the host country or region has been the main relocation among Fortune 500 companies between 1955 and 2017.…”