Many cities have seen public support for congestion charges increase substantially after charges have been introduced. Several alternative explanations of this phenomenon have been suggested, but so far little evidence has been available to assess the relative importance of these explanations....

The benefits captured in an appraisal of a railway investment are determined by what timetables the analyst assumes in the scenarios with and without the investment. Without an explicit, objective and verifiable principle for which timetables to assume, the appraisal outcome is virtually...

We estimate the value of time savings, different cycling environments and additional benefits in cost-benefit analysis of cycling investments. Cyclists’ value of travel time savings turns out to be high, considerably higher than the value of time savings on alternative modes. Cyclists also...

Cost-benefit analyses (CBA) are often questioned on the grounds that results depend crucially on uncertain assumptions about the future, and on ethically or methodologically contestable trade-offs between different types of benefits. This paper explores the robustness of CBA rankings of...

We explore how benefit-cost efficiency and electoral support affect road investment decisions in Sweden and Norway. In Norway, neither benefits nor costs seem to affect project selection. In Sweden, civil servants’ decisions are strongly affected by projects’ benefit-cost ratios, with a...

Congestion charges were introduced in Stockholm in 2006, first as a trial followed by a referendum, then permanently from 2007. This paper discusses what conclusions can be drawn from the first five years of operation, until mid-2011. We show that the traffic reduction caused by the charges has...

The standard method of estimating the value of travel time variability for use in policy appraisal is to estimate the parameters of a reduced-form utility function, where some measure of travel time variability (such as the standard deviation) is included. A problem with this approach is that...