Cost Benefit Analysis of Washington-Richmond High-Speed Rail

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Cost Benefit Analysis of Washington-Richmond High-Speed Rail Spring 2010 The research findings show that reducing congestion through better managed freeways has numerous documented benefits, including “reducing travel times, smoothing the travel flow, increasing average fuel economy and reducing vehicle queuing.” However, our study on HSR from Washington to Richmond will show that all the mentioned benefits will be realized with the implementation of HSR, as a potential countermeasure to congestion on the Washington-Richmond corridor. Traffic congestion is a widely recognized transportation cost. Several methods can be used to quantify and monetize this cost, which can provide different results, as shown in Table 7-2. 61 The most appropriate approach for many applications, although difficult to perform, is to calculate the marginal delay caused by an additional vehicle entering the traffic stream, taking into account the speed-flow relationship of each road segment. 62 Another approach is to determine the user fee needed to reduce demand to design capacity, based on travelers’ willingness-to-pay for road use. A third approach is to calculate unit costs of current expenditures on congestion reduction projects. In theory these three methods should produce similar values, assuming that roadway capacity is expanded based on vehicle delay costs as reflected in vehicle users’ willingness to pay, but in practice they often provide different results. 63 48 Table 7-2: Previous Congestion Cost Studies This table summarizes key congestion cost studies. These estimates range widely since they have been produced using different methods for different purposes. More detailed descriptions of these studies 61 Miller and Li, “Investigation of the Costs of Roadway Traffic Congestion” (California PATH, 1994) 62 Anthony Downs , “Stuck in Traffic” (The Brookings Institute), www.brookings.edu 63 Terry Moore and Paul Thorsnes , “The Transportation/Land Use Connection, Report ” (American Planning Association, 1993), www.planning.org
Cost Benefit Analysis of Washington-Richmond High-Speed Rail Spring 2010 are found below. Values are converted to 2007 U.S. dollars using the Consumer Price Index. * Indicates the currency year is assumed to be the same as the publication year 64 . 7.5 Environmental Legislation mandates that transportation projects have an environmental impact assessment. This assessment has to comply with regional standards in order to preserve or improve their quality of life. When the projects include environmental impacts in their evaluation, costs are internalized in the construction of infrastructure and will get passed on through the price of the service 65 , in this case the high speed rail price of the ticket. The benefits from the decrease in fuel used in the highway, mainly in I-95 will largely offset the social cost of air pollution (in our estimates an average of 290 cars will be taken out of I-95 annually). In weighting the impacts of environmental benefits and costs, the benefits outweigh the cost by 2 to 1 (see the chart below). At the maturity of the project savings in emissions will be close to 50 thousand dollars a year, while costs will be approximately 18 thousand dollars a year, as shown in Figure 7-4. 49 Figure 7-4: Savings and Costs of Emissions (2010 dollars) This could be achieved without affecting ridership (and thus mobility) as the increase in HSR ridership ( 433.4 million passenger miles) is matched by the decrease in car use (404.6 million passenger miles), with a slight positive effect in overall mobility, , as shown in Figure 7-5. 64 Note that CPI is not the only way to adjust for inflation and results can vary significantly with different methods, see Samuel Williamson, “Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1790 to Present,,” Measuring Worth, www.measuringworth.com 65 Ibid
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Cost Benefit Analysis of Washington-Richmond High-Speed Rail

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