Best practices in passenger rail project development

As more federal funding opens up to High-Speed and Intercity Passenger Rail (HSIPR) in the US, there is a strong need to put best practices in place to objectively evaluate and prioritize projects.

Given the relatively undeveloped state of intercity passenger rail planning methodology, it is possible that proponents of different projects may prepare their predictions of ridership, revenue, benefits and costs using different and perhaps incompatible approaches, making it difficult to evaluate, compare and prioritize the various projects on a consistent basis. To address this situation, the US Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) retained Steer Davies Gleave to research and document best practices in three main areas of HSIPR project development – ridership and revenue forecasting, operations and maintenance costs and public benefits.

Drawing on our reports, the OIG earlier this year prepared and issued its own audit report on guidance on high-speed rail viability assessments.

The objectives of the audit were to:

• “identify key focus areas for analyses of HSIPR project economic viability”
• “assess the FRA’s requirements and guidance for HSIPR grant applicants on the information they must provide to FRA on project viability”

Our reports present and discuss current international best practice methods in the three specific areas mentioned above. These guidance reports are based on our experience working on projects in the US, Europe and across the rest of the world. We have supplementedour own experience through reviews of publicly available documentationfrom HSIPR studies, and by drawing onprevious studies that have attempted to contrast forecasting methodologies and experience in different countries.

Although the reports do not explicitly refer to the evolving FRA guidance on HSIPR planning, they are intended to be useful contributions to the USDOT’s and FRA’s ongoing development of appropriate planning methods.

Steer Davies Gleave prepared a series of reports describing best practice methods for forecasting ridership and revenue, operating costs and public benefits for HSIPR projects. These reports are now publicly available through the OIG’s reading room website at: http://www.oig.dot.gov/foiaelectronic-reading-room