Workshop: Critical perspectives on CBA – and ways forward

Date: 3 December 2024, 09.30-17.00, 2024 Location: Virtual

Date and Place: 3 December 2024, 09.30-17.00 CET (Online)

Organizer: Linnaeus University, Sweden, for UBDPolicy. Coordination: Stefan Gössling and Nadja Schweiggart.

Scope: CBA is regularly used to evaluate transport investment decisions. Current practices tend to be biased in several ways: They focus on motorized vehicles and savings of travel time which can create a self-fullfilling prophecy: time gains, often based on optimistic assumptions, will justify investments. Community goals related to accessibility, health and liveability are often overlooked or undervalued. Given the lack of comparison of investment decisions – high-speed railway systems, active mobility in cities, these biases can result in suboptimal investments that fail to reflect community demands.

Objectives: The workshop seeks to critically review the value of travel time and its uses in the updated European Handbook on the external cost of transport, the use of discounting with relevance for key parameters such as climate change or air pollution. Specifically, the workshop will discuss whether cost-benefit analyses should only be used in transport planning processes that already have a focus on increasing accessibility, health and liveability, i.e., to assess the effectiveness of investments with these overarching objectives.

Workshop attendees: Individuals within the consortium and external experts

Workshop programme:

• 09.30-10.00 – Stefan Gössling. Introduction to transport CBA. EU & open issues for UBDPolicy
• 10.00-10.45 – Cornelis Dirk van Goeverden. A critical analysis of the Value of Travel Time
• 10.45-11.15 – Nadja Schweiggart. Discounting in CBA
• 11.15-11.30 – Coffee break
• 11.30-13.00 – Arno Schroten. The European Handbook on the external costs of transport
• 13.00-14.00 – Break for lunch
• 14.00-15.00 – Karel Martens. Accessibility and effectiveness in transport planning: when and where is it appropriate to use CBA?
• 15.00-16.00 – Todd Litman. Accessibility, health, liveability: transport CBA use in the future
• 16.00-16.15 – Coffee break
• 16.15-17.00 – Discussion
• 17.00 – End of Workshop

Speaker profiles

• Arno Schroten is Manager of CE Delft’s transport division. He has a Master degree in economics. Since 2005 he is involved in national and international research projects in the field of transport and sustainability with a focus on economic instruments and assessments. He had performed studies for the European Commission (DG MOVE, DG CLIMA, EEA), national governments (the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Germany), international NGOs (e.g. Transport & Environment) and transport associations (IRU, FIA, UIC). Arno is an expert in the field of external costs of transport. He has conducted many studies in this field, for a broad range of clients. For example, he has been the lead author of the European Handbook on the External Costs of Transport – 2019 version. Currently he is leading the update of this Handbook. Furthermore, Arno has broad experience in applying cost benefit analyses in the transport sector, e.g. with respect to road charging schemes, aviation taxation and airport expansion. Finally, he also has broad knowledge on transport taxes and charges applied within the transport sector, in order to internalise the external costs of transport, to gain revenues or to mitigate environmental impacts.
• Cornelis Dirk van Goeverden is a retired researcher at TU Delft who has published extensively on travel time, distance and speed.
• Nadja Schweiggart is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University, Sweden.
• Karel Martens is a Full Professor in Transport Planning and The David J. Azrieli Chair in Architecture and Town Planning at the Transport Lab, Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
• Todd Litman is founder and executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, an independent research organization dedicated to developing innovative solutions to transport problems. His work helps expand the range of impacts and options considered in transportation decision-making, improve evaluation methods, and make specialized technical concepts accessible to a larger audience. His research is used worldwide in transport planning and policy analysis.