Abstract Summary
The Transport Authority Amsterdam (TRA) recently established that it will guide its long-term mobility policy on the basis of sustainable development, instead of traditional economic indicators. The goal is to create a mobility system that balances economic wellbeing, with ecological and social wellbeing. Realizing this requires a novel approach to transport policy evaluation. Currently, the transport authority still strongly relies on traditional decision-making methods like Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA). Methods like CBA were originally developed to assess how policy projects contribute to economic welfare. The underlying assumption is that (private) consumer choices can indicate how residents value the effects of government projects. However, how people make choices with their private income (as consumers) may not align with how they believe the government should make decisions with public resources on their behalf (Mouter et al., 2017; 2018). Prior research for the Transport Authority Amsterdam already established that citizens find economic, social and ecological wellbeing important when asked to evaluate transport projects from a public perspective (Mouter et al., 2021). This research used a novel evaluation method called Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE). In a PVE, citizens choose their preferred portfolio of policy projects given a limited government budget. Based on these choices, individuals' preferences for government projects can be determined. These preferences can be used to rank government projects in terms of their societal desirability. This way, Mouter et al. (2021) find that citizens prioritize cycling and safety projects over car projects, which is opposite to the outcomes of a CBA. We build upon the research by Mouter et al. (2021) to investigate to the following research question: To what extent can PVE be used to make trade-offs between economic, social and ecological wellbeing effects of mobility policy? In Februari 2024, residents can participate in a PVE similar to the previous one. They will be asked to choose their preferred portfolio of mobility projects given a limited budget. This way we can elicit the preferences (different subgroups of) residents have for various mobility projects of Transport Authority Amsterdam. In addition, participants also see the effects of these projects on the following wellbeing goals: accessibility, sustainability, safety, health and inclusivity. This way, we seek to not only establish preferences for mobility projects, but also for these wellbeing goals. The aim is to use these preferences to determine the optimal portfolio of projects, where optimal means finding a balance between social, ecological and economic wellbeing. Finally, we by asking participants to motivate their choices, we obtain insights in the values and concerns underlying the preferences for mobility projects and wellbeing goals.
