New railways? Extra roads? Pricing policies to reduce environmental harmful transport emissions? Politicians face tough choices. What are the costs of these proposals? Will the plan result in the expected impacts? What are the risks of a plan? Who wins, who loses? Described is the practice of helping public decision- making by answering these kind of questions. Four cases of policy-related ex ante evaluations are evaluated. Ex ante evaluation refers to forward-looking assessment of the likely future effects of new policies of proposals. The assessment methodologies used in these four cases are not unique, and are not invented or improved in this thesis. Scientific literature pays relatively much attention to transport policy impact modelling and methodologies for valuing policy impacts. Examples of these valuation methodologies are cost-benefit analysis, multi-criteria analysis and combinations of those two. Less is written about the practice of ex ante transport evaluation. This aim of this thesis is to fill this scientific gap by describing and analysing the practice of policy-related ex ante evaluation in transport, based on experiences of the author. The thesis attempts to answer the following questions: What are the strengths of the evaluation methods used? Have they resulted in a better understanding of the consequences of a choice? What are the weak or debatable points? Considering the weak points and bearing in mind the need for speed and pragmatism in practice, what improvements could be proposed? (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting