[sustran] [sustran] Economic value of urban transport system

[Mark Diesendorf]

In response to Eric Britton:

My colleagues Kendall Banfield, Ria Hutabarat  and I at the Institute 
for Sustainable Futures have been working on a related problem: the 
real cost of various modes of urban transportation. So far, we have 
built up a large database on the costs and use of cars, buses and 
heavy rail in Sydney, Australia.  We have started with some basic 
economic costs--  land, infrastructure, rolling stock, operation & 
maintenance -- and measure costs in cents per passenger per km 
travelled.

We find that , even with this limited set of costs, the costs of cars 
are highest, followed by heavy rail and then buses.

The quantitative values of car and bus costs vary under  a 
sensitivity analysis that makes a wide range of assumptions about the 
assignment of road costs between cars and heavy vehicles. However, 
the main qualitative results, that cars are the most expensive,  and 
that all three modes of passenger transportation are heavily 
subsidised, do not change.

The paper was published in the Proceedings of the Australasian 
Transport Research Forum 23: 269-285 (1999), which unfortunately is 
not widely available. Subject to permission from ATRF, we will put 
the paper onto our Web site soon.

This year we plan to take into account the cost of crashes and 
traffic policing. This will of course increase the cost of cars 
relative to the cost of public transportation. We would also like to 
include the cost of cycling (land, infrastructure, rolling stock, O & 
M). We don't have the resources to tackle environmental costs at 
present, however we're aware of valuable work already done by Bent 
Soerensen and others.

Collaborating with a research group in China, we hope to do a similar 
project in a rapidly growing Chinese city and then create a process 
to involve government, business and other stakeholders to reduce car 
use and improve public transportation and facilities for cycling and 
walking. However, first we have to obtain some funding for this.


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>Dear Colleagues,
>
>Do any of you have access to a source which has tried to put credible
>numbers to the following?
>
>What is the ìeconomic valueî of the city transport system, i.e., the money
>price that one might put on it measured in terms of what people actually
>pay, one way or another, for this part of their daily lives? Per day? Year?
>Single city? A nation as a whole?
>
>Clearly that number would vary wildly depending on what one decides to try
>to include and the values chosen for each input (e.g., what externalities
>does on try to capture? what about the value of time in transit?). I can
>think of a number of different ways of cutting it to make the calculation,
>but no sense in my trotting all that out here since most of you know far
>more about it than I do. Moreover, I have seen such numbers here and the in
>the past, but none which has stuck in my mind.
>
>My interest in doing this?  Well, suppose one took a team to Boston, Prague
>or Lagos, sat down with the mayor or dictator of the moment, and showed her
>how she could reengineer the regional system to get a lot more throughput
>per economic unit, whether in terms of the cityís contribution or from a
>more global perspective (which, incidentally, should be her platform for
>reelection).
>
>And if these numbers already exist, how come no one is making proper use of
>them?
>
>Regards,
>
>eric britton

Mark Diesendorf, PhD
Professor of Environmental Science
and Director, Institute for Sustainable Futures
University of Technology, Sydney
PO Box 123, Broadway NSW 2007, Australia

email: Mark.Diesendorf at uts.edu.au
Web: http://www.isf.uts.edu.au

phone: +61 2 9209 4350
fax:   +61 2 9209 4351

ISF's address via UTS internal mail is Institute for Sustainable Futures,
Australian Technology Park.