In recent years transportation planners have found it necessary to evaluate the individual components of proposed transportation projects in an equitable and consistent manner. This requirement has been motivated by demands from the general public and politicians who want to ensure that all projects meet specific guidelines. The difficulty arises when transportation engineers attempt to perform an economic analysis of projects where some of the benefits are inherently non-monetary. For instance, the estimated number of lives saved from a given project is an example of a non-monetary benefit. The traditional approach to this problem is to transform the non-monetary benefits into equivalent equivalent monetary values to facilitate the economic analysis. This paper will examine the method by which benefit values for reductions in accident fatalities and injuries are evaluated across Canada. In particular, the more common methodologies for calculating these values will be presented and subsequently a survey of values used across Canada will be examined. Lastly, an example problem will be presented which will show how different approaches may affect the transportation projects selected for implementations. (A)
Abstract