atlas_shrugged wrote:@FatBat That is a useful post - thanks. Could you post any links to how campaigners can do a 'Value-for-money' assessment that will satisfy a council looking at any proposal. Maybe orientate this towards a single campaigner i.e. an individual with limited time and money at their disposal.
Things might have changed since I last worked in Transport Planning, but the standard guidelines are known as WebTAG and they run into many hundreds of pages. You can find them all here;
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/transport-a ... nce-webtagObviously, lots of people make a good living doing Value for Money assessments and the whole process is loaded against the interested amateur. But, to do a very basic Value For Money analysis of a cycling scheme the process would be;
1. Try to figure out the costs of the scheme (construction costs, maintenance costs, plus anything else you can think of). Transport schemes are generally assessed over a sixty year period, so you have to account for all costs over this period!
2. Try to figure out, and place a monetary value on, any benefits associated with the scheme. To start of, I'd look at time savings. If the scheme can save X people Y minutes per day, this can be monetised over the sixty year period. People are assumed to place a monetary value on their time - for example, if the scheme saves 100 people 2 minutes of travel time every day, and they value their time at 20p per minute, you have a benefit of £40 per day. You can then extrapolate that over 60 years (taking into account the fact that values-of-time will change over the years, and that benefits accrued far in the future are worth less than those accrued in the near future (this is known as discounting). You might then want to add in accident cost savings - every accident is assumed to cost the economy money and so reducing accidents can have a monetary value placed on it. All the numbers you will need are at this link;
https://www.gov.uk/government/publicati ... k-may-20183. Try to add in other benefits that you can think of - better health, better air quality, reduced congestion, etc. This is a bit outside my expertise, but I'm sure WebTAG will have something to say about it. When I did Cost-Benefit analysis for rail schemes, we used a rule-of-thumb that each vehicle-kilometre removed from an urban setting would have a benefit of £0.50. In rural areas it would be £0.10. This was suitable for a "back of an envelope" calculation.
If the benefits are more than the costs, the scheme is considered value for money. Divide the benefits by the costs to get the Benefit to Cost Ratio (BCR). A sensible policy would prioritise schemes with the highest BCR. Road schemes never got a look-in unless they had a BCR of at least 6. Cycling schemes are often said to have a BCR of at least 30. High Speed 2 struggled to get a BCR approaching 2, and this went down with every re-appraisal. I wonder what it is now.