High quality
facilities for transportation are of vital importance to the economy
and the environment.
However, no harmonised, common guidelines for evaluating the costs and
benefits of transport investments
and policies agreed among EU Member States are available. While
national evaluation frameworks widely
exist, these methods and the parameters used differ from country to
country and furthermore do not address
specific EU challenges such as cross-border effects or competitiveness.
There is a clear need for an
unambiguous and harmonised framework for socio-economic evaluation of
transport policies.
Thus, HEATCO's primary objective was the development of harmonised
guidelines for project assessment on EU
level. This included the provision of a consistent framework for
monetary valuation based on the principles
of welfare economics, contributing in the long run to consistency with
transport costing. As a first step,
the current project assessment practice in the EU member states was
reviewed and analysed. Then, existing
practice in the assessment of the value of time and congestion,
accident risk reduction, health impacts and
nuisances from pollutant and noise emissions, and infrastructure costs
was compared to the theoretical
and empirical evidence from the literature. As a key feature of HEATCO,
harmonisation of guidelines was
organised in a cycle process, involving representatives from member
countries from the beginning of guideline
development, with discussions and revision of different guideline
versions. Thus, a first workshop was held in April 2005 to inform about
the current practice for project assessment in the EU member states and
to discuss the necessity of having harmonised guidelines and the scope
and content of the guidelines. Based
on the recommendations acquired in this workshop, the HEATCO consortium
developed a proposal for harmonised
guidelines, that were presented and discussed in a second workshop
taking place in March 2006. Based on the feedback the proposed
guidelines were revised and presented at the final conference on 17 May
2006.
HEATCO had a number of further objectives: stated-preference surveys
were carried out in 6 countries to help fill the most
significant gaps in monetary values and add knowledge on the issue of
transferability and comparability of
values between countries. The proposed harmonised guidelines were
applied to 4 TEN transport infrastructure
projects to illustrate applicability of the guidelines and the
differences to existing CBA evaluations.
|
