SOCIO-ECONOMIC EVALUATION OF ITS-INVESTMENTS

How to make cost-benefit analyses to a better tool for analysing the socio-economic profitability of ITS-investments.

Content of the project

• Brief overview over different areas of application• Selection of alternatives• Literature studies• Socio-economic evaluation of consequences, except road-user

utility• Different solutions for road-user utility• Discount future amounts. Summarise to find net present value.

Areas of application and delimitation of the project• Traffic monitoring and traffic management• Public transport• Freight transport• Payment systems and access control• Navigation systems• “The intelligent vehicle”

Disregard projects of “personal character” Concentrate on areas supported by public funds. The information is

available for all travellers.= Main focus on traffic monitoring and traffic management

Socio-economic estimation of value

• Consequences:• Investment costs• Operating costs• Maintenance costs• Eventually environmental and accident costs

Other risk evaluation for ITS-investments than for traditional investments

Road-user utility ...

Basis alternative:- G0 = Generalised cost- X0 = Number of travel

Initiative alternative:- G1 = Reduced generalised cost- X1 = Increased number of travel

Demand curve

Generalised traveller cost

X0 X1 Travel

G0

G1

… is the change in consumers’ surplus as a consequence of the initiative.

• Improvement of quality is not included in the generalised cost, but in the “not-priced” effect of the initiative.

• Information might give better quality, but how can that be measured ?

Road-user utilityDifferent ways to measure road-user benefit:• Traditional cost/benefit analyse• Revealed Preference or• Stated Preference• Travel cost

Transport models• Micro-simulation• Macro-simulation

Simulation with AND without information

Conclusions• Transportation models:

• Initiatives for better road-user information can be modelled by micro-simulation, but have to calculate macro-parameters like travel-time and vehicle-kilometre.

• Data:• Several data are necessary to model the road-user behaviour.

• Road-user utility:• Alternative methods for measuring. Stated preference-test, and travel-cost

which allow for divagation from expected arrival time.

• Risk evaluation:• Appraise the difference in systematic risk for the ITS-project compared to

investments in infrastructure, and then choose discount rate.