Abstract Manager

Transportation business cases provide a framework to facilitate informed capital investment decisions. In British Columbia (B.C.), capital project business cases follow guidelines established by the Ministry of Finance and Infrastructure B.C. and include a benefit-cost assessment (BCA) and other relevant analyses.

Previously, transportation business cases quantified first-order impacts, such as travel time and cost savings.  With recent advancements in data availability and modelling capabilities, it has become common to include additional metrics that were difficult to quantify, yet socially significant, such as reliability, health, and urban realm. This is a significant development that supports objective analysis of a project’s social benefits.

As transportation investment values evolve from moving cars to people, and considering socio-economic changes and permanent shifts in post-COVID-19 travel behaviour, risk, equity, and environmental impacts are becoming key quantitative and qualitative inputs to business cases.

We present the Surrey-Langley-SkyTrain (SLS) Project as an example of business case evolution in B.C. SLS is a 16-kilometre rapid transit extension of the Expo Line that will connect City of Surrey with Langley City in Metro Vancouver. SLS will support several provincial priorities, such as creating affordable housing, childcare, the objectives of CleanBC and Transport 2050.

The SLS business case received provincial approval in July 2022. The project is expected to catalyze housing and economic development south of the Fraser River.  

In addition to conventional accounts, the SLS BCA added new metrics to the calculation of the net-present-value (NPV). These included improvements in travel time reliability, an attribute highly valued by travellers that can lead to modal shift. Another new account was economic agglomeration benefits resulting from improved accessibility among urban clusters. Changes in CO2 emissions, due to project construction and reduced vehicle travel, were monetized and included in the NPV. As part of the equity analysis, the business case considered access improvements to jobs in neighborhoods around SLS.

The SLS business case included a comprehensive uncertainty analysis using state-of-the-art exploratory modelling methods to understand potential upside/downside factors that could materially impact the Project’s ridership forecasts. One such factor was potential long-term changes to post-COVID-19 travel behaviour.

Enhancements to the SLS business case present an incremental evolution of project evaluation that leverages the latest data and analytical methods and recognizes the current urban mobility context and changing societal values.  

These enhanced analytical tools can support governments to better understand and evaluate a project’s social benefits, leading to more informed capital investment decisions.