Capturing the benefits of rapid transit

Tax dollars spent on any public project are coming under increased scrutiny as competition between projects for funding has become more intense. While many of the benefits of rapid transit investment have historically focused on improving journey times, cities and regions are increasingly looking to use transit investments as catalytic projects to attract growth and improve the quality of life for their citizens.

It is therefore important that projects and their promoters are able to capture and include the full range of project benefits in the ‘business case’ to ensure their projects are funded and delivered.

Multiple Account Evaluation (MAE) is a tool used to capture and present the range of benefits of many transit projects. By monetizing and including more of the project benefits, these can then be incorporated into cost benefit analysis, helping reduce the level of subjectivity when interpreting results and improving the overall case for funding. However, in many cases, we have observed promoters leaving out many of the key project benefits. The following are some tips to effectively capture the full benefits of your project:

Ensure that the modeling tools are fit for purpose

The transportation model network should be detailed enough to differentiate high capacity transit from conventional bus. Some regional strategic 4-stage models may not be well suited for capturing benefits of specific projects. Furthermore, a model that validates well against observed data may not necessarily provide realistic demand response to network or population/ employment changes (see article on Research and Innovation, Page 13), so professional review and judgement on model outputs is essential.

Model true benefits of rapid transit

Segregated rapid transit aims to deliver a service with regular headways and consistent journey times, which offers an improvement over conventional bus running in mixed traffic. Very rarely do we see promoters capturing the benefits of improved journey time reliability within their project evaluation. Improved service quality (such as comfort and capacity) is another consideration and these are generally termed mode constants. These mode constants can be reflected in the modeling parameters within transportation models such as boarding penalties and/or in-vehicle weighting factors.

These parameters can be established from literature research or local Stated Preference (SP) survey techniques, although their use is most effective when the modeling tool itself is calibrated with them in mind.

Capture the wider benefits of the investment

Investment in rapid transit is often used as a catalyst for economic growth or improving the urban environment and these wider benefits can also be captured:

• Economic Growth - Improved accessibility can lead to Wider Economic Benefits such as increased productivity through agglomeration of businesses and people moving to more productive jobs. These can typically add between 15 per cent and 40 per cent to overall user benefits.
• Urban Environment – on-street rapid transit often includes a significant cost associated with urban realm and pedestrian connectivity improvements. These have a value to passengers, pedestrians, residents and businesses in the area and while these can be assessed qualitatively, they can also be monetized and analyzed in conventional cost benefit analysis based on SP techniques.