Quantifying economic benefits for rail infrastructure projects

Investment in rail infrastructure is necessary to maintain existing service and to cater for future growth in freight and passenger services. Many communities have realized the importance of investment in rail infrastructure projects and set up goals and visions to achieve economic development through investing in such projects. Due to limited funds available, communities have to select a single or very few projects from a variety of projects. It is very critical that right projects must be selected at the right time for a community to realize economic development. The limited methods for quantifying the economic benefits to the stakeholders often cause a problem in the selection process. Most of the conventional methods focus mainly on the economic impact of the project and ignore the metrics that convey the economic impacts in meaningful ways to the key stakeholders involved. This leads to uncertainty in the project selection and planning process and often leads to failure in achieving the goals of the project. This study aims to provide a mathematical framework that quantifies economic benefits of investment in rail infrastructure projects in meaningful ways to the key stakeholders through three different approaches, namely, Leontief-based approach, Bayesian approach and system dynamics approach. The Leontief-based approach is the easiest of all the three approaches provided that historical data is available. Bayesian approach is also very beneficial as it can be used by coupling small data with surveys and interviews. Also, system dynamics model is very useful to conduct qualitative analysis, but the quantitative analysis part can become very complex --Abstract, page iii

Quantifying Economic Benefits for Rail Infrastructure Projects

This project identifies metrics for measuring the benefit of rail infrastructure projects for key stakeholders. It is important that stakeholders with an interest in community economic development play an active role in the development of the rail network. Economic development activities in both rural and urban settings are essential if a nation is to realize growth and prosperity. Many communities have developed goals and visions to establish an economic development program, but they often fail to achieve their goals due to uncertainties during the project selection and planning process. Communities often select a project from a vast pool of ideas with only limited capital available for investment. Selecting the right project at the right time becomes imperative for economic and community development. This process is significantly hampered by limited methods for quantifying the economic benefit to key stakeholders. Four methodologies are used in this project to determine the most useful tools for quantifying benefit given the availability of data, relevant expertise, and other information