More roads needed
How could I not link to this Road Fix article from the New Statesman.
Ah objectivity what's the best way of achieving it - assign arbitrary monetary values to things. so what's this piece of land worth? Well if you were able to build houses on it then £X, if you knew it was going to be needed to build a road on then £Y, on its own - nothing! And that's the kicker land by itself has no monetary value, it only gains a value once we the people decide to do something with it that can be sold, rented, or charged for. So how do you assign a monetary value to something like a site of scientific interest? Perhaps you can look at the locality - if nearby houses have greater resale value due to their proximity to the site that'd be a value, does it bring in people who spend money in shops and B&Bs. That's a start, but what about those sites that are far from the madding crowd, how far do you spread the net until you hit a house or business?
A lot of people visit these areas because they're relaxing, so how do you assign a monetary value to that? Increase in productivity due to less stress; 1 hour at the site equals 1 more productive hour at work? Multiple the time by the average wage and produce a figure, but what if average wage increases, what if it decreases; does the site lose value?
The difficult lies in the measurement medium - money. Monetary values change all the time, your house has increased in value 80% since you bought it despite nothing being done to it, fuel prices go up and down. Build the road this year and it'll cost £X, build it next and it'll be £Y; have the plans changed in the meantime nope just the costs.
So let's do something strange, how about pretending we have infinite money. If we have an infinite amount of money then all this value assigning is pointless. We now need a finite value, so how about time itself? Time is non-reusable you can't say "Wow that last half-hour was pointless can I have that time back please" it's gone never to be seen again.
Amount of time by people spent on this site, minus the amount of time saved by people using the road, minus the amount of time lost by people delayed by roadworks while building the road, plus the amount of time people spent on complaining about the road, minus the amount of time spent complaining they need a road.
Needs work, but it's got to be a better system then assigning meaningless values to everything.
2 comments:
Having read the New Statesman article, and then returning to your blog, I was half expecting you to rant about Jonathon Leake's article on the "New Approach to Appraisal" or "Nata" rules themselves. I was left not having a clue as to what "section 3.5.1[1] of the Nata rules" states and so have no idea whether Jonathon Leake's interpretation is fair, or inaccurate or the equivalent to scientific mumbo-jumbo. It sounds good but its use here only serves to confuse.
However, I do think that much of the DfT scientific analysis is flawed in favour of both road and air travel over investement in rail. The way the three modes are taxed is crazy - aviation fuel in untaxed but road and rail pay highly and the passengers on rail are expected to pay for the infrastructure, in full, over a 20 year period but the road infrastucture is paid for by us all whether we travel or not and over a sixty year period. No value is attributed to environmental impacts such as quality of life and mental and physical health of the whole community.
My rail rant over.
Ah the article should have linked to NATA TAG guidelines and 3.5.1[1] should really be referenced as 3.5.1[1.1.6-1.1.7] which should give some idea of how fun this document is to read.
As to value of environmental impacts that shows up on the AST Table 3.2[1.2.3] however you then need to reference each subcategory to discover how each is scored (and no they don't provide links you need to go back to the index each time) All good fun.
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