CIVE Evaluation

Background

A transportation system often constitutes the largest public investment in an urban area. It ensures the economic vitality of a region by providing mobility and accessibility of people, goods, and services. Traditionally, proposed transportation investments were evaluated based on standard cost-benefit frameworks involving measurement of time savings, vehicle operating costs and accidents as well as qualitatively assessing environmental impacts. However, selecting sustainable transportation investments entails a broader evaluation approach based on an integrated assessment of transportation impacts on three main levels namely, economic, social, and environmental. Moreover, recognizing travel as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, and as enabling people to participate in activities, it can thus be argued that a transport system affects the manner in which economic and social activities are organized, and hence the land-use.

Course Content

This course introduces tools and techniques for the evaluation of transportation designs, plans, and programs while covering a wide range of impacts organized under the three objectives of Sustainable Transportation: economic growth, environmental preservation, and social equity. Course topics include:

• Introduction to transportation planning and decision-making
• Estimating transportation demand and supply
• Estimating transportation costs
• Land-use impacts
• Travel-time impacts
• Safety impacts
• Economic efficiency impacts
• Economic development impacts
• Energy, air quality and noise impacts
• Social impacts and equity
• Multi-criteria evaluation

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Identify ways of “measuring” transportation sustainability
• Derive performance indicators based on the extensive information that is usually obtained from transportation models
• Understand the link between planning and decision-making
• Understand the challenges of selecting sustainable and reliable policies under an uncertain future

Schedule of Lectures

Week 1

• Introduction to transportation planning and decision-making

Week 2

• Impacts of transportation systems, dimensions of evaluation
• Sustainable transportation indicators

Week 3

• Transportation and accessibility

Week 4

• Energy and air quality impacts
• Estimating transportation emissions

Week 5

• Environmental lifecycle-analysis of passenger transportation

Week 6

• Transportation-land-use interaction

Week 7

• Integrated land-use transport models

Week 8

• Travel time impacts
• Value of time

Week 9

• Economic development
• Social impacts and equity

Week 10

• Estimating transportation costs and benefits
• Economic efficiency; benefit-cost ratio, net present value, monetising externalities

Week 11

• Multi-criteria evaluation techniques

Week 12

• Sustainability as a multi-criteria evaluation problem
• Case study presentation of full evaluation processs

Week 13:

• FINAL PRESENTATIONS
• Work sessions on a group case study

Course Materials

• Sinha, K.C. and Labi, S. 2007. Transportation Decision Making: Principles of Project Evaluation and Programming. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New Jersey, USA.
• Black, W.R. 2010. Sustainable Transportation: Problems and Solutions. The Guilford Press, New York, USA.
• Lautso, K., Spiekermann, K., Wegener, M., Sheppard, I., Steadman, P., Martino, A., Domingo, R., Gayda, S. 2004. PROPOLIS: Planning and Research of Policies for Land-use and Transport for Increasing Urban Sustainability, Final Report 2nd ed., Available from: http://www.wspgroup.fi/lt/Propolis/.
• Meyer, M.D. and Miller, E.J. 2001. Urban Transportation Planning, 2nd Ed. McGraw Hill, New York, USA.
• Yoon, K.P. and Hwang, C.L. 1995. Multiple Attribute Decision-Making: An Introduction. SAGE Publications Inc. Thousand Oaks, CA, USA.