Up to date valuations of travel time savings and reliability are to be provided by a new study designed to help better appraise transport infrastructure schemes.

The Department for Transport has appointed Arup to lead a research project that will feed into the UK’s official transport analysis guidance, known as WebTAG, which provides values of travel time savings to assess publicly funded transport projects. The consultant will work alongside the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds and data collection firm Accent in compiling the study.

It has been nearly 20 years since the most recent national ‘value of time’ study was conducted in the UK. The new study follows publication of scoping reports by the DfT in October last year which recommended that its values should be updated.

The aims of the new study are to provide new national average values of travel time savings and to investigate factors that cause variation in the values.

Changes in working and commuting practices and the Internet revolution – which has changed how many users of public transport make use of their time while travelling – are partly behind the decision to update the guidance.

A DfT spokesman said: “We expect the research project to take around a year, with any resulting revisions to guidance following after that.”

A slimmed down version of the WebTAG guidance was introduced in January and is available on the gov.uk website.

(Photo: Highway Agency)

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