NCDOT Benefit/Cost Analysis for Planning Highway Projects

Evaluating the economic feasibility of highway projects can be a time consuming and difficult process. Over time and a variety of projects, analysts may use inconsistent methods and data with the result that similar projects cannot be compared with respect to their relative costs and benefits. To rectify these problems the North Carolina Department of Transportation supported this effort to develop a tool that will provide consistent estimates of the costs and benefits for various highway projects. The tool developed by this effort applies concepts from the AASHTO Redbook and a customized version of the Redbook Wizard spreadsheet. The standard Redbook Wizard expects highway project input data to include base year peak hour period traffic volumes and capacity measures for the build and no-build cases. The Redbook Wizard then uses internal forecasting procedures to estimate future year values of peak hour traffic and capacity and the resulting difference in user travel time to establish project benefits versus project construction and operation costs. The customized NCDOT Wizard optionally relies on externally estimated values for base year and future year daily traffic volumes, travel times and capacity measures as the basis of benefit-cost analysis. The customized NCDOT Wizard accepts conventional NCDOT default data and documents input and output data for each highway project case study. The final report documents the project, provides a user manual, and develops case study applications for several types of highway projects.

  • Record URL:
  • Corporate Authors:

    North Carolina State University, Raleigh

    Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering
    2501 Stinson Drive, Campus Box 7908
    Raleigh, NC  United States  27695-7908

    North Carolina State University, Raleigh

    Institute for Transportation Research and Education, Centennial Campus, 909 Capability Drive
    Raleigh, NC  United States  27695

    North Carolina Department of Transportation

    Research Unit, 104 Fayetteville Street
    Raleigh, NC  United States  27601

    Federal Highway Administration

    1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
    Washington, DC  United States  20590
  • Authors:
    • Findley, Daniel J
    • Stone, John R
    • Fain, Shannon J
    • Foyle, Robert S
  • Publication Date: 2007-7

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Web
  • Edition: Final Report
  • Features: Appendices; Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 58p

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01152591
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: FHWA/NC/2006-43
  • Files: TRIS, USDOT, STATEDOT
  • Created Date: Mar 16 2010 6:14AM