Factoring sustainable development into the appraisal of investment projects is a topical issue at both the analytical and the decision-making level. In the area of analysis, we find numerous studies and research projects devoted to the assessment of environmental damage and its translation into...

Mathematical optimisation models, supported by suitable data, can assist decision making about allocating funds between alternative maintenance tasks and about the size of the maintenance budget. The maintenance optimisation problem is, in essence, to find the optimum balance between the costs...

This paper considers the choice between different approaches to contract for the construction and maintenance of infrastructure projects. The need to control for user costs over the life cycle of an asset is demonstrated to be a core aspect of contract design. The more likely it is that a...

Since the mid 90's, public transport patronage in Île-de-France (the Paris region) has increased substantially: over the last decade alone a 20% growth was observed. This growth, even though it was an aim of the Sustainable Urban Mobility plan adopted in 2000, was not completely anticipated....

Origin-destination demand, trip patterns, pricing and transport networks alone cannot explain passenger demand for public transport modes. Other factors of convenience and service quality play a key role in influencing demand and mode choice but they are often more complex and harder to define,...

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...

The UK National Audit Office (NAO) scrutinises public spending on behalf of Parliament, helping it to hold government departments to account and helping public bodies improve performance and delivery. We publish around 60 value for money studies each year across a range of government activities,...

This paper reviews methods that seek to draw causal inference from non-experimental data and shows how they can be applied to undertake ex-post evaluation of transport interventions. In particular, the paper discusses the underlying principles of techniques for treatment effect estimation with...