Over the past 10 to 15 years, the growth of passenger vehicle travel volumes has decelerated in several high-income economies and, in some, growth has stopped or turned negative. Drawing from work presented to and discussions at the ITF Roundtable on long-run trends in travel demand, held in...

A brief review of long run projections of demand for road transport suggests that problems related to road network congestion and greenhouse gas emissions are likely to become more pressing than they are now. Hence we review, from a macroscopic perspective, popular policy measures to address...

The practice of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) has a long tradition in France, dating back to Dupuit (1849), but is still a topical subject. This practice is in fact the result of the combination of economic theory and decision processes regarding project choices. Both of these are constantly...

We propose a series of kick-off points related to the economic appraisal of large urban infrastructure projects, taking some account of the specifics raised by the Grand Paris Express (GPE) regional automatic metro. The points, in the form of Maintained Hypotheses or Questions in Need of...

Economic contributions of investments of transport infrastructure are typically assessed from a microeconomic perspective, which tries to identify the link between specific transport infrastructure improvements and the productivity of specific production units. The traditional economic tool of...

Assessments of the economic benefits of transportation infrastructure investments are critical to good policy decisions. At present, most such assessments are based of two types of studies: micro-scale studies in the form of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and macro-scale studies in the form of...

Transport activities have adverse environmental and health impacts, of which local and regional air pollution, climate change, and noise impacts are the most important. This paper is a non-comprehensive overview of existing and potential policies to deal with these negative impacts, with a focus...

This paper discusses the role of transportation in policies to address energy security and climate change. It focuses on three elements: the impact of energy prices on transport demand, the potential contributions of the transport sector to energy policies, and the interaction between energy and...

Standard textbook analyses of road pricing tend to assume that users are homogenous, that there is no travel time risk, and to have a view of congestion as static. The simple analysis also ignores that real pricing schemes are only rough approximations to ideal systems and that the general...

The case for including agglomeration benefits within transport appraisal rests on an assumed causality between access to economic mass and productivity. Such causality is difficult to establish empirically because estimates may be subject to sources of bias from endogeneity and confounding. They...