The Presence of ITS: Implications for the Business Case versus Social Cost Benefit Analysis for Investment

How does the emergence of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) in an ever-increasing variety of ways enhance or reconcile the differences between social cost benefit analysis (SCBA) and a business case in evaluation? Investigation of this suggests that ITS impacts in two, substantially different, ways. First, the presence of ITS can affect the evaluation per se and, secondly, the type of ITS application proposed can affect how projects involving ITS are evaluated (i.e., whether the evaluation should be a business case or SCBA). Each of these issues are addressed in turn in this paper. The arguments are illustrated using the example of real-time passenger information at bus stops.