CIVITAS DYN@MO develops user-friendly cost benefit tool for cities to evaluate measures
The European Commission has for many years emphasised the importance of calculating the costs and benefits of CIVITAS measures in money terms, using cost-benefit analysis (CBA). However, in previous CIVITAS projects, cities have found it difficult to do a CBA because of a lack of a simple user-friendly tool that does not demand too much data, time or prior knowledge from the user. Hopefully this is now a thing of the past with the development by Lund University, Project Evaluation Managers in CIVITAS DYN@MO, of just such a tool.
“Our CBA calculator is spreadsheet based and requires very little data about the measure to carry out a simple CBA” said Dr Anders Wretstrand at Lund University, who oversaw the development of the new tool by MSc student Tim Larsson, and with input from Professor Tom Rye, now at Edinburgh Napier University. “We hope that cities around the EU will find it helpful and easy to use if they need to calculate the monetized benefits and costs of their measures, something that can be very helpful in convincing politicians of the value of low cost sustainable transport investments in relation to major new roads infrastructure.”
The tool is available for download on the CIVITAS website. It takes into account many different benefits including time, operating cost and accident savings, changes in air quality and noise. It uses monetized values of these benefits taken from Swedish and UK sources but adapted to take into account differences in purchasing power in different DYN@MO countries. However, if expert users have local values, they can include these in the spreadsheet if they wish.
Author: Anders Wretstrand
