New Methodology for Railway Infrastructure Evaluation and its Impact

Abstract

The paper is focused on the evaluation of the economic efficiency of investment projects in the area of railway structures in the Czech Republic. The economic evaluation of projects of the transport structures including the railway structures has in recent years undergone through significant changes resulting into the final form of the united resort methodology of the Ministry of Transport of the Czech Republic, which from the methodological point of view covers the economic evaluation of all projects of transport structures. The main objective of the paper is to evaluate the impact of methodological changes in the financial and the economic evaluation of projects of railway structures. New methodological approaches can have the influence on economic results of monitored investments. The attention is paid to all aspects influencing the economic efficiency of the projects, especially the issues of investment and operational costs, costs for the trains operation and whole society benefits in the form of time savings, savings resulting from externalities a savings resulting from increased safety on railway are solved. From the methodological point of view, the paper is focused on the comparison of the approach to economic evaluation according to the previous methodologies specialised exactly on projects in the railway infrastructure with the approach according to the new methodology. The new resort methodology unifies specific parts of the analysis for all types of transport constructions and at the same time defines partial methodological approaches intended for particular transport modes. Within the previous methodologies the "transition methodology" valid from the half of 2016 to the acceptation of new resort methodology in November 2017 is also considered. In the frame of research works, the identified differences are also analysed. Impacts of methodological changes are presented on the case study of the model railway construction, from which the significant decrease of values of criterial indicators declaring lower economic efficiency is evident. Impacts are solved individually for particular parts of the financial and the economic analysis. From the case study is evident that all aspects included in the economic evaluation result to the decrease of the total economic efficiency of the investment project on the railway connected with the changes in methodology, however the changes in travel time savings and savings on externalities are the most important.