The use of Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as a tool for selecting transport investments is often questioned. It is not unusual that politicians or others in the public debate argue that the outcome of a CBA completely rely on assumptions concerning a particular input factor, such as valuation of CO2 emissions or future fuel price. This paper explores whether the relative ranking of CBA outcomes are robust with respect to some key inputs in transport demand analysis driving cost, public transport fare and economic growth. We study six different infrastructure objects (three road and three rail objects) and four alternative assumptions on input factors compared to a reference scenario.

The findings suggest that single input factors in a CBA, individually have a small impact on the ranking of the studied investments. In our model calculations we observe no change in rank between a road and a rail object.

I denna rapport har vi gjort en lönsamhetsberäkning för Stockholms tunnelbana med gängse svensk kalkylmetodik och fastställda nationella riktlinjer. Lönsamhetsberäkning är gjort för dagens tunnelbana, som om man på 1950-talet (när tunnelbanan byggdes) hade haft och använt de metoder och modeller som används för samhällsekonomisk analys idag. Vi har varierat antaganden om skattade samband, hur utredningsalternativet utformas och vad det jämförs mot. Vi varierar också antaganden om byggkostnad och beräknar lönsamheten för tunnelbanan både med byggkostnaden från den tiden en uppskattning av vad den hade varit idag. Vi försöker dessutom uppskatta effekter på bebyggelseplanering och de effekter på tillväxt som normalt ligger utanför den gängse samhällsekonomiska kalkylen. Beräkningarna visar att Stockholms tunnelbana var en samhällsekonomiskt lönsam investering. Det bör understrykas att eftersom beräkningen är gjort för den nuvarande tunnelbanan säger den inte något om lönsamheten av en eventuell utbyggnad av Stockholms tunnelbana.

Standard CBA is often criticised for not taking land use effects induced by transport investments and wider economic benefits into account. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the size of these effects using the Stockholm Metro built in the 1950’s, the largest urban rail investment in Sweden, as a case study. We find that benefits of the Metro increase 60 percent due to long term land use adjustments. Wider economic benefits increase the benefit by 17 percent.We show that the Stockholm Metro was socially beneficial to build according to present standard methods, even without taking land use effects and wider economic benefits into account. Hence, the anecdote that the Metro of Stockholm had not been built if CBA had been a part of the appraisal seems to be false.

Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) has been a fundament of appraisal in Northern European Countries for decades and is becoming increasingly important in Sweden (Eliasson and Lundberg, 2011). Still, the CBA methodology is a relatively young tool and has been developed for evaluation of smaller infrastructure objects. Also proponents of the CBA method recognise some methodological problems (see for instance Mackie and Preston (1998)), in particular of large infrastructure investments. To undermine the trust in CBA as an accurate decision support, it is often stated in the Swedish debate that the Stockholm Metro, build in the 1950’s and now central for the functioning of the traffic system and commuting, would not have shown a positive CBA outcome if the present methods and tools had been available at the time.

The purpose of this paper is to perform an ex-post cost benefit analysis of the Metro system, the largest urban rail investment in Sweden. The Stockholm Metro has a track length of 105 kilometres, of which 62 kilometres are in tunnels, with a total of 100 stations spread over three lines. The application of CBA to an investment of the size of the Stockholm Metro illustrates clearly that there are certain benefits that may not be sufficiently well captured in standard CBA: land-use benefits, labour market benefits and benefits arising from increased capacity in the road and public transit network. In this paper we try to assess the size of the external labour market effects and land-use effects in the Stockholm Metro case.

Standard cost-benefit analysis (CBA) does not take into account induced demand due to relocation triggered by infrastructure investments. Using an integrated transport and land-use model calibrated for the Stockholm region, we explore whether this has any significant impact on the CBA outcome, and in particular on the relative ranking of rail and road investments. Our results indicate that induced demand has a larger impact on the benefit of rail investments than on the benefit of road investments. The effect on the relative ranking is still limited for two reasons. First, the number of houses that are built over 20 30 years is limited in comparison to the size of the existing housing stock. Second, the location of most of the new houses is not affected by any single infrastructure investment, since the latter has a marginal effect on total accessibility in a city with a mature transport system. A second aim of this paper is to investigate the robustness of the relative CBA ranking of rail and road investments, with respect to the planning policy in the region 25 years ahead. While the results suggest that this ranking is surprisingly robust, there is a tendency that the net benefit of rail investments is more sensitive to the future planning policy than road investments. Our results also underscore that the future land-use planning in the region in general has a considerably stronger impact on accessibility and car use than individual road or rail investments have.

This paper performs an ex-post cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of the Metro system in Stockholm built in the 1950s. We find that the Metro was socially beneficial and that the largest benefit of the Metro is its capacity, making it possible for many people to travel to and from the city center. We also assess the significance of the wider economic impacts due to labor market distortions and the land-use effects in the case of the Stockholm Metro. The wider economic impacts increase the consumer surplus with 48%, and the yearly income in the county with 1.5%. A land-use model is used to simulate how the land-use has been influenced by the Metro over the years 1956-2006. This simulation indicates that the historical centralized planning of housing along transit corridors has developed the region into a more dispersed region than if the market forces had ruled. The simulation also suggests that the land-use impact from the investment itself is small, but that the land-use impact from the planning accompanying the decision to build the Metro has been substantial.

Ökad andel resor med hållbara färdmedel är en förutsättning för att kombinera fortsatt tillväxt med minskad resursförbrukning och miljöpåverkan. I många europeiska städer har cykel blivit ett alltmer populärt färdmedel under de senaste decennierna. Dagens storskaliga transportmodeller, som utgör viktiga verktyg för utvärderingar och samhällsekonomiska analyser, är dock oftast fokuserade på modellering av resor med bil eller kollektivtrafik. Den här rapporten presenterar en tur-baserad transportmodell med syfte att bättre modellera cykelresor. Nyheterna i denna modell är bland annat ett detaljerat cykelnät som innehåller mer än 200 000 länkar och att modellen nyttjar en mer detaljerad zonindelning. Jämfört med nuvarande verktyget för samhällsekonomisk analys av cykelåtgärder, GCkalk, beskriver modellen ett fullständigt utbud och efterfrågan för cykel på detaljerad geografisk nivå. Modellen har skattats på data från den senaste resvaneundersökningen i Stockholms län från 2015 och representerar därmed observerat resebeteende. Modellen beaktar även cykel som anslutningsfärdmedel till resor med kollektivtrafik. Därigenom behandlar modellen cykel- och kollektivtrafik både som konkurrerande och som komplementära färdmedel och modellen kan utvärdera effekten av en förbättring av cykelinfrastrukturen på både enbart cykelresande och på cykel som anslutningsfärdmedel till kollektivtrafikstationer. Modellen är validerad mot cykelräkningar i Stockholm stad från september och oktober 2015. Modellen har testats på sex scenarier valda från Stockholms stads investeringsplan. Resultaten visar att investeringarna har en begränsad effekt på överflyttning mellan färdmedel och en måttlig effekt på befintliga cyklisters ruttval, restid och generaliserad kostnad.