Assessing the Socio-economic Impacts of Railway Investments

The Finnish Transport Agency (FTA) requires preparation of socio-economic assessments for infrastructure investments. In the past the impacts of investments on railway capacity and traffic punctuality were only assessed qualitatively. trenolab worked with Ramboll to develop a quantitative method. trenolab used our TRENOanalysis and TRENOplus software to develop and test various methods for quantitatively assessing socio-economic impacts. Ultimately two methods were selected. The first is based on capacity; it adapts the UIC 406 method to the characteristics of the Finnish rail network. The second considers delay propagation; it uses mathematical regression to estimate delays given a set of line parameters. The proposed methods were designed to provide network managers with accurate and easy-to-use for evaluating the effects of investments on network saturation and delays. This study has been approved and adopted by the Finnish Transport Agency. A paper entitled “Punctuality and Capacity in Railway Investment: A Socio-Economic Assessment for Finland” was presented at Rail Norrköping 2019.