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Transport appraisals in European countries increasingly address three dimensions of sustainability-economic, ecological and social. However, social impacts of transport have been underexposed in (ex-ante) transport project appraisal, at least in the Netherlands. Firstly, this article presents a theoretical framework describing the relationships between determinants of social impacts of transport; it also provides a definition and categorization of those impacts. Secondly, the article reviews the state of the practice of national transport project appraisal in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The article shows that social impacts of transport investments can take on many forms and their levels of importance may vary widely, in project appraisal. The UK transport appraisal guidance includes a spectrum of social impacts through quantitative and qualitative assessments that is broader than the Dutch appraisal guidance. However, it does not cover the full range as identified in the literature. This holds, in particular, for the temporary impacts of transport investments, health impacts, social cohesion, the distribution and accumulation of impacts across population groups and social justice. All in all, it can be concluded that there is a long way to go before social impacts of transport projects are completely included in appraisals, in a way that allows us to compare them to economic and ecological effects.

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Abstract. Despite the wide array of academic research, the impacts of compact urban development are not very well understood. What is lacking are, firstly, the insights into how a region or country would have appeared under policy regimes other than those realised and, secondly, a broad evaluation of relevant land-use, transport, accessibility and related societal and ecological impacts. Here, we report on an initial attempt to establish a methodology and evaluation framework for analysing the effectiveness of Dutch compact urbanisation policies implemented between 1970 and 2000. Our conclusion is that without compact urban development policies, urban sprawl in the Netherlands would have likely been greater, car use would have been higher at the cost of alternative modes, emission and noise levels in residential and natural environments, and the fragmentation of wildlife habitats would have been higher.

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Abstract. Conventional approaches to measuring accessibility benefits are not capable of fully measuring the total accessibility benefits of integrated land-use/transport strategies, where both land-use and transport changes form part of the policy strategy. In this paper, a comprehensive methodology for analysing accessibility impacts and accessibility benefits, based on location-based and utility-based accessibility measures within an integrated landuse/transport interaction-modelling framework is described and applied in a case study. The case study examined the accessibility benefits and related user benefits of intensive and multiple land use strategies aimed at increasing the density and diversity of activities around railway stations for the Netherlands Randstad area for the 1996-2030 period. It is shown that heavy concentrations of activities near railway stations result in decreasing marginal returns for public transport users and disbenefits to car users.