Since the mid-1970s, many british local authorities have developed analytical tools to establish a set of priorities among competinghighway scheme proposals. these priority assessment techniques (pats) vary greatly in terms of structure, complexity, data requirements, diversity of schemes to which they are applied, and role within the planning process. nevertheless they all seek to reduce multivariate information on different projects to a common base, thereby permitting comparison and the setting of priorities in order to optimize the use of scarce capital resources. in this paper, pats currently used by the local authorities are compared and evaluated, and ways of improving and streamlining their application are suggested. a diverse sample of six pats is tested on a common set of six highway schemes that have different impacts and costs. the widely different project rankings thus obtained suggest the need for a more homogeneous approach to pat development and use, and the paper concludes with an outline of a methodology for achieving this. this paper appears in transportation research record no. 1156, transportation systems planning and management.
Abstract