Full Compensation and Transportation Corridor Analysis

In urban highway building both aggregate accounts and disaggregate accounts must be kept. These are sometimes called users and nonusers accounts. All accounts should show a net gain if the highway is to be built. In such accounting it is important that neither costs nor benefits are included twice. Impact analysis will always be a necessary supplement to benefit cost analysis because full compensation, like other important goals, can be approached but never attained. But until full compensation is an objective in all expropriation procedures both transportation link design and network analysis will be flawed, hidden costs, such as the time and talent costs to agencies and consultants caused by delays, will continue, and urban freeway transportation links will continue to be politically difficult and in many cases impossible. Most important is the objective of fairness. Only with full compensation can the ancient essential and continuous process of civic construction and reconstruction be equitable and humane.