DOES REDUCING JOURNEY TIMES IMPROVE THE ECONOMY - AND, IF NOT, WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR TRANSPORT ASSESSMENT?

Transport is mainly a service function ‐ it is there to support the community and its economy. A transport system, or indeed a transport project, is ‘measured’ in terms of what it can do to facilitate the well-being of the community either indirectly in relation to its actual performance (‘outputs’) or directly in terms of its actual effects on that well-being (‘outcomes’). Any changes in the status-quo of a transport system is generally measured in terms of its community costs and benefits ‐ the theory of which stretches back to Jeremy Beetham in the eighteenth century ‐ and which has been practically used for public administrative purposes since the water resources development in the 1930s in the USA. It is generally accepted that an important output element in transport performance is the time taken to actually travel, which is normally taken to be wasted / unused. Therefore any reduction in travel time is normally seen as a gain / benefit and has, since Dupuit’s paper of 1844 1 , been described as a ‘consumers’ surplus’ if valued at more than any expenditure by the consumer to achieve it. In contemporary transport cost / benefit appraisals the value of time savings provide over 85% of total use benefits within the Transport Economic Efficiency Analysis (TEE). However there always has been a counter argument against the need to reduce travel time, a nineteenth century anti-railway quotation from John Ruskin being: ‘Now, every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell in Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange ‐ you Fools Everywhere.’ 2 The measurement of community outcomes has until recently not been seen as either practical or realistic to forecast ‐ despite an historical underlying assumption that transport development (whatever that means) does indeed help the economy (although this may be a localised effect possibly achieved by ’transfer’ from elsewhere). These however now have a part to play in transport appraisal 3 and are defined as ‘Wider Economic Benefits’ (WEBs) and ‘Economic Activity and Locational Impacts’ (EALIs):