Large transport infrastructure projects have always been viewed as landmarks for their respective regions and countries. Nonetheless, there are positive and negative implications of projects of such scale, as well as increased risks for the developers and funding bodies. Transport costs are within the core of the New Economic Geography, which is a theory implicitly adopted by various EU policies, with TENs (Trans European Networks) forminga good example. It is among the fundamental assumptions of this research that location does matter and there is a need for high quality transport links between economic centres around Europe to facilitate movement of production factors. Nonetheless, it does not fall within the aims of New Economic Geography to examine the issue of project appraisal. The latter is thebroad focus of this paper which is based on ongoing PhD research. Variousappraisal methods have been developed since the 19th century to evaluate the impacts of transport projects. Until recently Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) has been the dominant method, including efforts to assess the equity impacts of transport projects despite some limitations in the CBA approach.This study aims at providing a theoretical framework for assessing equityimpacts of large transport infrastructure projects based on an alternative approach, namely Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA). This theoretical approach applies a normative method which is considered appropriate to use when referring to equity considerations in relation to transport projects. One of the strengths of the proposed equity framework is that it encourages thedecision maker to select the most appropriate equity principle to be applied to each project through use of the Analytic Hierarchy Process. Weightsfor the priority of each decision maker with respect to equity types and equity principles are derived through the use of an AHP questionnaire. These weights are then utilised to derive an overall equity indicator to assess the project impacts. This indicator consists of various other existing indicators (transport, environmental, socioeconomic), which are used as a proxy to assess the equity impacts of a transport project. The proposed equity framework is implemented in a TEN-T (Trans-European Transport Network) project as a case study to assess its applicability and highlight its limitations and deficiencies. TEN-T projects are landmarks not only for their surrounding regions and economies, but for the EU as a whole, as they are considered an essential component for future development. By assessing transport project equity impacts through the perspective of New Economic Geography, the significance of these projects for agglomerations around the EU is highlighted. A specific case study TEN-T project has been selected for the research reported here which is already in operation and as a result an ex-post data analysis and test of the proposed framework can be conducted. In this way the inevitable uncertainty of forecasting methods is avoided. This paper has the aims of firstly suggesting an equity framework toassess the equity impacts of large transport infrastructure projects and secondly reporting on its benefits and limitations through a case study. As such, it may be of interest not only for academics conducting research regarding transport appraisal, but also for practitioners involved in decision making of large transport infrastructure projects. For the covering abstract see ITRD E145999
Abstract