Distribution of Benefits of Public Transit Projects

The paper examines the basic issues related to efficiency and equity and reviews the existing techniques of including income redistributive effects in the evaluation of public projects with the objective of determining their applicability to the case of urban mass transit projects. The current techniques of estimating the benefits of rapid transit as well as conventional bus systems and the quantification of their distribution among the various socioeconomic groups of beneficiaries are examined. It is pointed out that in the case of urban transportation projects, it is necessary for practical reasons to extend the concept of an equitable distribution of income to that of mobility or the opportunity to travel. Two alternative procedures based on the criteria of the dependency of individual groups on particular modes for different purposes are suggested for analyzing the distributive effects of urban transportation projects.