Workshop 7 report: Assessing the wider benefits of public transport projects

Abstract

Workshop 7 concluded that the terminology, ‘wider benefits’, tends to reinforce a narrow impact assessment-based approach to transport policy and project evaluation. Participants argued that a preferred approach is to concentrate on identifying (triple bottom line) societal goals and identifying initiatives to achieve those goals, in which case ‘wider benefits’ become core rather than add-ons. This shifts the planning/policy cycle focus to the starting point: need identification and initiative definition, as distinct from narrowly based impact assessment of initiatives conceived elsewhere. Against this background, Workshop papers examined a range of economic and social goals whose achievemen..