Improving transport appraisals
How we travel over the next 60 years will be crucial to tackling climate change. We need to get transport infrastructure right to ensure that people can make the best travel choices. And this is all down to how transport schemes are appraised.
All proposals for new transport schemes must be approved by the Department for Transport’s mandatory appraisal process, NATA (New Approach to Transport Appraisal). If the overall impact of a transport scheme is assessed as financially positive, it gets the go ahead.
NATA is a powerful process and it is the reason why we don’t have more bus and rail services and better facilities for walkers and cyclists.
Although the government has recently tweaked with the way NATA works, its changes have not gone far enough. NATA still has a bias against public transport schemes, for example, under NATA a cyclist’s time is worth 28p a minute compared to 44p a minute for a car driver. If a motorist switches to a bus, walking or cycling, suddenly the value of their time plummets.
As long as NATA continues to operate in its current form we will have less cycling, walking and public transport schemes and more road schemes.
We have developed five case studies to show how the Government's system affects the transport schemes that go ahead in different locations, by favouring car use above cycling, walking and public transport. We put the original data from these schemes through our proposed revised version of NATA to show how the results could have been different if the appraisal process was changed. Our case studies illustrate the effect that these decisions could have had on people’s lives.
The report was launched on 30 November, 2009 at an event with Theresa Villiers MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Transport.
Read the summary and our technical report.
[Note: since going to press, we have learnt that the Cambridge guided busway scheme is not likely to be operational until the New Year]
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