Criteria used by the government to judge the relative merits of transport projects are to be revised to prevent the benefits of road schemes being overestimated at the expense of public transport schemes.
An extensive update to the National Approach to Appraisal (NATA) project guidelines, published by the Department for Transport, will introduce changes in April 2010 that are expected to encourage investment in public transport schemes along with measures to encourage walking and cycling.
One of the biggest changes in evaluating projects will be that schemes designed to encourage people not to travel by car will no longer have to treat fuel tax loss as a disadvantage of the project. This follows consultation with stakeholders who viewed as counter-intuitive the concept that such revenues should improve the benefit to cost ratio of a scheme when taxation is in turn used to encourage or subsidise public transport use.
Using the new guidance, scheme promoters will also be able to appraise the impacts of cycling and walking, quantify the reliability improvements due to a transport intervention, incorporate the latest forecasts of the drivers of transport demand, and analyse the uncertainty around such drivers. Greater importance will be attached to journey time improvements - particularly time savings - which currently only feature in a few views rows of the NATA Appraisal Summary Timetable.
In working out the merits of different projects, a new 'Very High' category will be introduced to describe schemes offering returns greater than four times their costs, helping the government to better differentiate and prioritise between the very best schemes. Changes to appraisal criteria are expected to reduce the amount of computer modelling and analysis required to work up plans for capital projects costing less than £20m.
The NATA reforms have been welcomed by the Campaign for Better Transport. Stephen Joseph, the group's executive director, said: "We have campaigned to make the government's transport appraisal more even-handed and support schemes that will give real choice to transport users, and these reforms go some way to helping. However, we think tiny time savings, especially by motorists, still get too much value in the system, and other factors like carbon reduction and traffic intrusion get far too little."
He added: "Government economists are still trying to put meaningless monetary values on landscape and trade them off against small time savings. We will be pressing for further reforms and for the government to apply these reforms to several current road schemes to ensure that they don't get priority. What matters is what actually gets built - and at present too many road schemes and not enough sustainable transport projects are coming forward from regional bodies and local councils."
The Campaign for Better Transport has criticised the current RFA2 regional funding process which, it says, required each English region to submit a "wish list" of transport schemes to the DfT for approval. According to the organisation, all regions except Yorkshire and Humber wanted to spend the majority of their RFA2 funding allocation on building roads, in some cases delaying public transport improvements. It has urged the government to reject many of the proposals in favour of more environmentally friendly projects consistent with national government policy.
The DfT launched a review of the NATA system in 2007 following the government commissioned Eddington Study and Stern Review. The new approach to evaluating schemes will be piloted with local authorities and other stakeholders ahead of the new NATA rules coming into force in 2010.
