D10 (NRP 41) - Benefits of transport
Overview
Background & policy context:
The NRP 41 was launched by the Federal Council at the end of 1995 to improve the scientific basis on which Switzerland's traffic problems might be solved, taking into account the growing interconnection with Europe, ecological limits, and economic and social needs.
The NRP 41 aimed to become a think-tank for sustainable transport policy. Each one of the 54 projects belongs to one of the following six modules:
- A Mobility: Socio-institutional Aspects
- B Mobility: Socio-economical Aspects
- C Environment: Tools and Models for Impact Assessments
- D Political and Economic Strategies and Prerequisites
- E Traffic Management: Potentials and Impacts
- F Technologies: Potentials and Impacts
- M Materials
- S Synthesis Projects
Objectives:
The benefits of transport represent an important issue in the political debate in many European countries. It is presented as an argument in a context of infrastructure extension, pricing of transport and environmental policy.
A decision on a specific transport infrastructure investment raises big hopes with respect to the resulting benefits for a region. External benefits are often presented as an argument to countervail proposals to internalise external costs of transport via tariffs.
More generally, the benefit of transport issue, which has several dimensions, has gained importance in the context of the sustainable transport debate.
Swiss transport research has focused for some time now on transport externalities.
Ecoplan (1993) stated in a National Science Foundation Programme (NRP 25) that it is essential to distinguish between benefits from transport infrastructure and benefits deriving from transport as such. The benefits of transport are huge but mainly internal. Important external benefits do not exist.
So far, overall benefits of transport have hardly been analysed in Switzerland. The automobile associations have sponsored most research on the issue. A recent study by Baum (2000) for the VSAI finds additional benefits from Swiss transport activities (excluding transit) of 57.9 billion Swiss Francs. According to the project coordinator, 14.9 Billion Francs of these have to be considered external benefits.
The present study attempts to bring some light into the discussion by proposing, on the one hand, a theoretically sound overview on the state of the international discussion of the issue and by presenting, on the other hand, empirical estimates in selected fields in order to fill existing knowledge gaps.
Methodology:
The overview on the state of the international discussion of the issue is mainly based on an analysis of foreign literature that has been discussed with international experts during a workshop jointly organised with the European Conference of Ministers of Transport (ECMT) in Bern.
The works undertaken in the UK by the SACTRA committee (1999) played a key role. The empirical research for Switzerland looks at the macroeconomic and microeconomic benefits of transport.
From a macroeconomic perspective value added in the transport sector is a valid and periodically available indicator for utility. An investigation of the input-output matrix permits to identify the value chains in transport and to indicate the interactions between transport and the other sectors of the economy.
On the microeconomic level this study concentrates on transport benefits in the short run. The benefits of specific mobility have been estimated based on detailed empirical enquiries.
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