The UK Roads Review--a hedonic model of decision making

In 1998, the UK Government published the results of its Roads Review. For each of the 68 schemes considered, an Appraisal Summary Table was produced, giving the scheme performance against the Government's five objectives--environment, safety, economy, accessibility and integration. This paper reports the development of a model which best reproduces the pattern of decision making and from which the implicit weights or values on the variables in the assessment table can be inferred. The model shows that the appraisal scores for variables such as noise, landscape, heritage, reliability and regeneration play a significant part in 'explaining' the decisions which were made.