Some issues in the European Investment Bank methods for evaluating public transport project: shifted users’ benefits

The European Investment Bank documents a method to evaluate urban public transport projects. This method uses, among other things, the difference of travel time between the “origine mode” (used in the no policy scenario) and the destination mode (used in the policy scenario). This approach is intuitive but provides distorted results whenever one cannot measure the exact and exhaustive value of each attribute for each diverted traveller. This paper shows the simplest example of how this distortion takes place and how it can be avoided by using surplus based methods.