The health benefits of transport projects: A review of the World Bank transport sector lending portfolio

Background Paper for the IEG Evaluation of World Bank Support for Health, Nutrition, and Population
Peter Freeman and Kavita Mathur
IEG Working Paper 2008/2
World Bank
2008

The transport sector plays a crucial, overarching role in the global economy: it facilitates access to jobs, education, health care, markets as well as for social and leisure activities. Yet, transport also has detrimental impacts on the environment and on human health, and this can result in conflicts in the formulation and application of transport policy. While traffic injuries, fatalities, and annoyance from transport-related noise have long been identified as negative externalities, there has been increasing evidence in the past decade of direct effects of transport-induced air pollutants on mortality and respiratory disease. The adverse impacts of transport on health are worse in developing countries than in industrial countries, as resources are more limited, regulatory controls are often inadequate and poorly enforced, the transport fleet tends to be older and technically more inefficient, the population is generally less educated, and transportrelated law enforcement is frequently inadequate.

This paper reviews the contribution of the World Bank’s transport lending portfolio to health outcomes, as background for the Independent Evaluation Group’s (IEG) evaluation of the Bank’s support for health, nutrition and population(HNP). Over the past decade (FY97-06), the World Bank committed nearly $28 billion to 229 new transport projects managed by the Transport Sector Board (TSB). Specifically, the paper reviews the extent to which these projects: cite potential health benefits or risks in design documents; include specific objectives with respect to improving health outcomes or mitigating health risks; propose environmental improvements that are likely to provide health benefits; target transport services and both health and behavioral outcomes to the poor; and plans to collect evidence on changes in health outcomes as a result of transport interventions. For completed projects, it assesses the extent to which expected health
benefits or objectives have been achieved.

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Guangzhou, China Bus Rapid Transit: Emissions Impact Analysis

Colin Hughes
ITDP
May 2011

The first phase of the Guangzhou Bus Rapid Transit (GZ BRT) opened in February of 2010, and it has already become an important demonstration of the efficacy and efficiency of high-capacity, full-featured BRT in Asia. In recent years over a dozen lowvolume bus rapid transit systems have sprung up throughout Asia. GZ BRT breaks this trend, with the first BRT system outside of South America with a daily volume comparable to, and in many cases in excess of, an urban metro-rail. Before GZ BRT, Zhongshan Avenue’s traffic speeds were plummeting and hundreds of buses blocked
traffic while struggling to pick up passengers on crowded curbs. Today, travel speeds are up 29% for buses and 20% for mixed traffic, and bus riders wait in safety and comfort in new high-quality center-median stations.

The analysis of GZ BRT presented here, after just one year of operation, examines aspects of the system design, performance, cost-recovery, and emissions reduction of Asia’s first metro-scale BRT.

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Reducing Carbon Emissions from Transport Projects

Evaluation Knowledge Brief
July 2010

ADB

A new report, “Reducing Carbon Emissions from Transportation”, recently published by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) provides an important new roadmap to cut greenhouse gases in this sector. With this report, the ADB becomes the first multilateral development bank to estimate the carbon footprint of its transportation assistance programs. These amount to 792 million tons for the projects supported by ADB between 2000-2009, nearly equal to the annual land transport emissions of Thailand.

Press release by ITDP

Project presentation, key findings, recommendations and tools (Evaluation models of several transport modes)

Evaluation model example:

Model 6: Urban Transport - Bus Rapid Transit System

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Evaluación económica de infraestructuras de transporte

Cuadernos Económicos de ICE N.º 80
Segundo semestre 2010

Presentación
Ginés de Rus

The rationale for economic evaluation in Europe: the case of EU Regional Policy
Andrea Mairate

Intellectual bridges across project evaluation traditions: the contribution of EU Regional Policy
Massimo Florio y Silvia Vignetti

La evaluación de proyectos de inversión en transporte por parte de las instituciones financieras internacionales: la experiencia del Banco Europeo de Inversiones
Mateu Turró

Current debates on the cost-benefit analysis of transport projects in Great Britain
Chris Nash

Aspectos institucionales para potenciar la evaluación social de proyectos en transporte: lecciones de América Latina
Andrés Gómez Lobo y Christian Belmar

La toma de decisiones en la política española de transporte: aportación y limitaciones de la evaluación de proyectos
Ángel Aparicio

On the treatment of taxes in cost-benefit analysis
Per-Olov Johansson

Problemas en la práctica de la evaluación económica de proyectos de transporte
Ofelia Betancor y Javier Campos

La predicción de la demanda en evaluación de proyectos
Mar González-Savignat, Anna Matas y Josep Lluís Raymond

La racionalización de las infraestructuras de transporte en España
Germà Bel

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Quantification of the non-transport benefits resulting from rail investment

David Banister and Mark Thurstain-Goodwin
Journal of Transport Geography
June 2010

Traditional methods of evaluation have not been very successful in accounting for non-transport benefits resulting from rail investments. But increasingly, these factors are becoming more important in well-developed transport networks, as the effects of additional links or capacity cannot be justified in transport terms alone. This paper brings together the evidence at three separate levels arguing that there are different impacts that must be investigated at different levels with appropriate methods. At the macroeconomic level, regional network effects can be identified, as can the impacts on the economy as measured through changes in output and productivity. At the meso level, the impacts relate more to agglomeration economies and labour market effects, with some additional network and environmental consequences. At the micro level, the impacts are determined by the land and property market effects. Examples of rail investment are given for each of the scales of analysis, and conclusions are drawn on the future directions and challenges for the quantification of both transport and non-transport benefits.

1. Introduction
2. Macro economic effects – impacts on economic growth
2.1. Case Study 1 – the channel tunnel rail link (CTRL) in London
3. Meso economic effects – impacts on agglomeration
3.1. Case Study 2 – the Crossrail line (CL) in London
4. Micro economic effects – impacts on land and property values
4.1. Case Study 3 – the Jubilee Line Extension (JLE) in London
5. Comments and conclusions
Acknowledgements
References

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