Is It Worth It? Sketch Appraisal Of
The Relevance Of Proposals For New Rail Lines
Author(s)
P. Tzieropoulos & R. Gindrat
Abstract
Proposal for building new rail lines or extending existing ones may become a
mixed blessing for transport policy managers. On the one hand, proposals may
eventually lead to projects that enhance the rail network, upgrade the services
and, ultimately, increase the rail patronage. On the other hand, extravagant ideas
may in fine hamper legitimate developments or, at least, create enough confusion
to stall the public debate about more valuable investments. It is interesting to be
able to assess the relevance of an idea at the very early stages. This may help
explaining to politicians and to the general public not only the advantages of a
proposal but also the issues that are related to it. The tool that has been
developed is based on the work done by Prof. Baumgartner, who published a
quite complete catalogue of unitary costs, investment and operational as well. It
uses a complete and scalable set of unitary costs that users may modify and adapt
to their own context, and provides answers to questions such as:
• What is the level of public subsidy to make a project economically viable,
given the expected demand and the fare structure?
• What is the required level of demand, given the public subsidy and the fare
structure, to ensure the economic viability of a project?
The tool is a single, quite sophisticated, Excel file, with all the initial data
customisable by the user. It is scalable: the user may opt for synthetic/global
values or, on the contrary, for a more detailed cost structure with a more in-depth
break-down of the unitary costs. The tool targets the early stages of a project,
even when its alignment is not yet fully defined. The objective is to produce a
first \“Go/No Go” decision to further pursue and study an initial idea.
Keywords: sketch planning, unitary costs, Baumgartner, new rail line.
Keywords
sketch planning, unitary costs, Baumgartner, new rail line.
Related Book
Other papers in this volume
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