[Truncated abstract] In an urban network, any change to the capacity of a road or an intersection will generally result in some traffic changing its route. In addition the presence of intersections creates the need for frequent stops. These stops increase the fuel consumption by anywhere between thirty to fifty percent as evidenced by published standardised vehicle fuel consumption figures for urban and for country driving. Other components of vehicle operating costs such as tyre and brake wear and time costs will also be increased by varying amounts. Yet almost all methods in use for economic evaluation of urban road projects use open road vehicle operating costs (sometimes factored to represent an average allowance for stopping at intersections) for one year or sometimes two years in the analysis period and then make assumptions about how the year by year road user benefits may change throughout the period in order to complete the analysis. This thesis will describe a system for estimating road user costs in an urban network that calculates intersection effects separately and then adds these effects to the travel costs of moving between intersections. Daily traffic estimates are used with a distribution of the flow rate throughout the twenty-four hours giving variable speed of travel according to the level of congestion at different times of the day. For each link, estimates of traffic flow at two points in time are used to estimate the year-by-year traffic flow throughout the analysis period by linear interpolation or extrapolation. The annual road user costs are then calculated from these estimates. Annual road user benefits are obtained by subtracting the annual road user costs for a modified network from the annual road user costs for an unmodified network. The change in the road network maintenance costs are estimated by applying an annual per lane maintenance cost to the change in lane-kilometres of road in the two networks. The Benefit Cost Ratio is calculated for three discount rates. An estimate of the likely range of error in the Benefit Cost Ratio is also calculated
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/221121 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Lloyd, Evan Robert |
| Publisher | University of Western Australia. Economics Discipline Group, University of Western Australia. Information and Computation Systems Discipline Group |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Evan Robert Lloyd, http://www.itpo.uwa.edu.au/UWA-Computer-And-Software-Use-Regulations.html |
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