California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

This research builds on the contributions of MOU 357, 3001 and task Order 4119 all of which focus on methodological and measurement issues in benefit cost assessments of ITS applications. The important contributions of this work are not only providing methods for calculating benefits and costs but also an empirical assessment of the set of projects that have been implemented. In all of this work, as well as most other project evaluation studies, two strong assumptions are made. First, the project is implemented successfully and second the impact of the transportation project is felt wholly within the transportation choice sets of consumers and producers. In the first of these assumptions, a project could potentially be declared unsuccessful when the technology may in fact be quite appropriate and potentially provide significant benefits, but the way it was implemented may have lessened some of the potential benefits. The study of implementation is one of understanding processes and how people integrate with new methods and technologies.