The construction industry is struggling with declining productivity. As Sweden’s largest public-sector purchaser of constructions services, the Swedish Transport Administration launched a programme aimed at increasing productivity. One important component of this programme was the introduction of design-build procurement to increase the leeway provided to contractors to identify innovative and efficient solutions. In this case study of the programme, which focuses on design-build contracts, we have conducted 27 interviews with Swedish Transport Administration project managers, contractors, and consultants to examine how successful the implementation of some of these measures has been and what hurdles they have encountered.

In this paper, we study how the distributional preferences of planners and the public diverge in the context of national infrastructure planning. To do so, we surveyed a sample of 323 planners working at the Swedish Transport Administration and 2,108 members of the Swedish public. The most striking difference is that planners place a relatively higher value on aggregate benefits than the public. Planners also place a significantly higher relative value on infrastructure plans that benefit rail transport compared to the public. It is our contention that planners value aggregate benefits relatively more highly because they have a better understanding of the attribute and because they have internalised the long-standing goal of an economically efficient Swedish transport sector.

Transaction costs have been an issue since the advent of the deregulation of the European railway markets in the 1990s. Transaction cost economics received renewed attention in research on the deregulated railway markets in the EU after the publications of two influential reports in the early 2010s. In this article, we develop a model that enables classification and measurement of transaction costs and other coordination costs in deregulated markets. This model is then used to analyze the costs of path allocation in the Swedish railway sector and to compare the results with findings in previous research. We also discuss the economic rationale of the distribution of coordination costs among the involved parties. Our key empirical findings are that the total coordination costs in the Swedish market-mimicking path allocation process are as low as or lower than the most cost-efficient market coordination processes studied in railway markets, and that the state administrations take on nearly all the coordination costs in order to minimize the effects of opportunism, rent-seeking and information impactedness. Another finding is that the size of the coordination costs found by different studies seems to be dependent on whether a bottom-up or a top-down approach is used.

Under-priced street parking is widely considered to be a great urban policy failure and is partly what motivated Stockholm to expand its parking zones for both visitors and residents from 2016 onwards. In this paper we use a unique natural experiment to study the effect of priced parking on property prices in Stockholm suburbs. We find that apartment prices were negatively affected by the unexpected appeal and subsequent revocation of parking fees. This finding is interpreted to mean that the introduction of priced parking yielded benefits to apartment residents in the studied areas, which were capitalized in the price of housing. Based on our estimated results, we find that the implied benefits to residents amounted to the equivalent of approximately €2.5 per day. We investigate whether apartments were differentially impacted based on their distance to public transit but find no strong evidence to support this hypothesis. For single-family homes, no conclusions can be drawn as the standard errors are large in relation to the estimated effects.

The nature of the relationship between the built environment and our travel choices is elusive. While researchers, planners and architects have long observed that certain types of built environment correlate with certain travel choices, the extent to which this effect is driven by residential self-selection or is a response to the environment remains unclear. Moreover, it is far from certain that everyone responds to the environment in the same way. In this paper, I examine whether responses to the walkability of the built environment differ between individuals with stronger and weaker preferences for active travel modes. I identify weaker preferences for active modes by using data on movement impairments and show that these individuals do not respond to walkability as strongly as those with stronger preferences. This contributes to our understanding of the potential of the built environment to influence mode choice.

In this paper, we present a study of Swedish inhabitants' preferences for distribution in three dimensions in the context of transport investments. Using choice experiments, we study the respondents' preferences for the distribution of benefits in the geographical, gender, and income dimension in relation to aggregate benefits. We find that they have quite strong preferences for equality in all dimensions, especially in the gender dimension. Additionally, when distribution is unequal, respondents tend to prefer that it is uneven in favour of non-metropolitan regions, women and low-income earners. We also find that variables describing self-interest, some general beliefs and the extent to which respondents consider the Swedish society to be fair may explain some preference heterogeneity.

I regeringsuppdraget (I2021/ 02412) framgår att VTI, i samarbete med Trafikverket och Transportstyrelsen, ska utreda förutsättningarna för undantagshantering från de medicinska föreskrifterna med avseende på synfältsbortfall (B-körkort). Vidare ska tre aspekter beaktas: hur andra länder gör, konsekvenser för den enskilde samt samhällsekonomiska konsekvenser. Slutrapporten påvisar att Sverige med gällande rättsligt ramverk inte kan genomföra de förslag som slutrapporten föreslår. Det innebär att det kommer att krävas juridiska förändringar. Givet att dessa förändringar genomförs och att ett nytt förfaringssätt nyttjas visar slutrapporten på att a) positiva effekter för den enskilde individen uppstår, b) samhällsekonomiska vinster uppstår och c) en rättssäker och rättvis prövning är möjlig. 

Slutrapporten redovisar dessutom hur ett urval av andra länder har hanterat handläggningen av individer med synfältsbortfall givet samma EU-direktiv som Sverige regleras av. Det framgår också av undersökningen att samtliga länder, som en förutsättning för undantag från de föreskrivna kraven avseende synfält, tillämpar krav eller rekommendationer om att ett praktiskt körprov ska utgöra del i underlaget för bedömning av körförmågan. 

Kunskapsläget med avseende på körförmågebedömningar för individer med synfältsbortfall redovisas och där framgår med tydlighet att perimetrin som Sverige utnyttjar som underlag för återkallelse av körkort inte kan predicera individers körförmåga. Perimetrin är dock viktig eftersom individer med synfältsbortfall som grupp kan vara olämpliga förare. Slutsatsen som forskningslitteraturen enstämmigt lyfter är att det behövs förarprov (på väg eller i en simulator) för att kunna genomföra en valid bedömning. 

Slutligen innehåller slutrapporten vilka problem (aktiviteter) som kvarstår för att skapa en lämplig och kvalitetssäkrad process. Dessutom presenteras den kronologiska ordning på aktiviteter som behöver genomföras. Kronologin krävs eftersom resultatet av lämplig metod och aktör påverkar det vidare arbetet med avseende på utformning av körprov och rättsligt ramverk. 

Slutrapportens slutsats är att Sverige har möjligheten att genomföra en förändring med avsevärda nyttor. Detta eftersom de valda aktörerna och de valda metoderna existerar idag och därför endast behöver utvecklas i viss mån för att säkerställa att individer med synfältsbortfall erbjuds en kvalitetssäkrad, rättssäker och rättvis process som dessutom bedöms vara samhällsekonomiskt lönsam.

The overall aim of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of goal conflicts between various policies in the transport sector and their distributional impacts. This aim is broken down into two research themes:

1. What are the distributional outcomes of the transport system?
2. How do different actors incorporate distributional considerations into the allocation of infrastructure investments?

This thesis comprises of four papers. Papers I and II relate to the first theme and Papers III and IV to the second.

In Paper I we study whether income explains why some choose to travel with public transport using single tickets when their cheapest ticket is a monthly travel card. We investigate this using the Swedish national travel survey and find a positive relationship between travel card possession and income among those for whom the monthly card is the cheapest ticket.

In Paper II I study the effect of accessibility on other markets, in this case the market for food. Specifically, I study how accessibility explains variations in the price of food in supermarkets. I find a U-shaped relationship with higher prices in low and high accessibility locations and lower prices in medium accessibility locations. 

In Paper III we investigate how the Swedish Transport Administration (STA) compiled the draft 2018-2029 plan. We do this by studying which qualities of individual investments that explain inclusion probability, complemented by interviews with planners.

In Paper IV we conduct a choice experiment to solicit the public’s preferences for aggregate benefits and distributional outcomes in the context of infrastructure investments. The distributional dimensions included are geography, gender, and income. We also conduct latent class analysis to capture heterogeneity.

Are there option values for transport services? A few studies have tried to answer this question through various stated preference methods, but we do not know much about its magnitude in different contexts. In this paper, we summarize the theory on option value, present previous empirical work concerning transport, and discuss its links to accessibility. Accessibility can be seen as the end product of the transport system, and the argument we pursue is that option value is a component of accessibility. Therefore, estimations of the option value ought to be connected to the marginal accessibility change of an optional transport mode. The concept of substitutability has the potential to meet this criterion. It is the degree to which an alternative trip can replace an initially preferred trip, or, put differently, how accessibility at a location is composed. We conduct an empirical application to test whether the variation in housing transaction prices is associated with substitutability. We find that housing prices are higher where the accessibility is built up by several transport modes, given any level of total accessibility. We interpret this as households, on average, are willing to pay a risk premium to keep optional transport modes available.