Beyond cost-benefit analysis; the search for a comprehensive evaluation of transport investment

Major advances have been made in trying to go beyond the conventional cost-benefit analysis appraisal of major transport projects that focus almost entirely on user benefits. Whilst newer methods to estimate the potential for agglomeration impacts in an imperfectly competitive world have become more mainstream there is still a desire to be able to capture more robustly the even more transformational impacts that are often claimed to result from major projects. This paper reviews some of these approaches and discusses how they have been used in some projects in the United Kingdom. It concludes that there is still scope for further improvement but that the desire of policy makers for precise estimates may have to be modified.