TRANSECON: transport infrastructures impacts assessment: a comparative study

The TranSEcon research project take place in the Fifth Framework research program of the European Commission. It aims to provide qualitative and quantitative evidence regarding the existence of direct and indirect effects of transport infrastructure investments in 13 European cities. The long term effects of implemented large scale public transport infrastructure investments is being analysed using databases together with stakeholder interviews in the 13 European case studies. The selected case studies cover a good range of city and intervention types (in terms of geographical distribution, city size, transport policies and investments). This communication deals only with transport related impact which analysis is now finished within TranSEcon project. The methodology is based on the definition of a reference scenario which is a scenario where the investment would have not have been realised. The impact is therefore measured as the difference between observed data (with the investment realised) and the reference scenario. A zoning system has been defined in order to distinguish impact in the zone close to the project, from the zone directly concerned by the project. As the TranSEcon research project deals mainly with long term projects, three temporal horizons were used to calculate the impact of the project. The paper presents both the methodology and the results obtained in the comparative analysis of the transport related impacts. For the covering abstract see ITRD E126595.