Cost-benefit analysis

Standard Transport Appraisal Methods

“…The first three chapters are dedicated to Cost-Benefit Analysis which is the dominant method of transportation project appraisal (Naess, 2020). Koopmans and Mouter (2020) (Chapter 1) aim to provide an up-to-date overview of recent literature regarding the application and the development of CBA in the context of Transport Policy and Planning. For me it was a great pleasure to write this chapter together with Carl -who is also known in the Netherlands as 'Mister CBA'.…”

“…The chapter also reviews the development in the literature toward directly measuring welfare impacts in a more direct way through self-reported well-being questionnaires (SRWB). Koopmans and Mouter (2020) discuss four caveats of valuing impacts of government projects through this approach that might be interesting to alleviate in further research projects.…”

“…An observation in various chapters is that the academic literature seems to focus on the refinement of the technicalities of the appraisal methods, whilst there is limited attention for the extent to which appraisal methods provide useful information for key user groups such as civil servants and elected officials (e.g. Dean, 2020;Koopmans and Mouter, 2020). Koopmans and Mouter (2020) observe that most research efforts tend to focus on improving the quantitative predictions provided by CBAs rather than making CBA analyses more useful for political decision-making.…”

“…Dean, 2020;Koopmans and Mouter, 2020). Koopmans and Mouter (2020) observe that most research efforts tend to focus on improving the quantitative predictions provided by CBAs rather than making CBA analyses more useful for political decision-making. Dean (2020) could not find any studies which investigate the opinions of politicians, government officials, civil servants and other transport decision-makers regarding the perceived pros and cons of multi-criteria tools and techniques.…”

“…Both methods were described in Chapter 1 (Koopmans and Mouter, 2020) and Chapter 6 (Dean, 2020a) respectively, including a discussion of state-of-the-art developments and remaining research challenges. The purpose of the present chapter is to provide an in-depth comparison of the two methods by, amongst other things, reviewing the literature which elaborates on the pros and cons of both methods.…”