In the economic assessment or appraisal of transport a higher weight needs to be placed on environmental and climate impacts

Interview with Werner Rothengatter

Reflecting about the aim of the REBALANCE project, Werner Rothengatter is noting that there are already concrete visions for more sustainable and environmental friendly development within the EU laid down in the recent flagship initiatives of the EU’s current Green-Deal. Given that, he states, “The aim can be achieved, the visions are there, but the implementation is missing in particular from the political side. “. A consequence is that instead of investing into environmental friendly modes, like e.g. rail or inland waterways, the main part of funding especially in regional development plans still goes into roads and even the funding for digitalization and automation of systems goes into roads. He made two suggestions how to avoid such wrong developments in the future. One is to make future visions for transport and economic development obligatory in national laws so that political decision makers have to follow them. Another suggestion is a stronger collaboration between national and EU authorities so that the implementation of imposed laws and direction for national governments become easier, for instance through extended subsidization and co-financing.

When talking about economic assessment or appraisal of transport Rothengatter argued that higher weight needs to be placed on environmental and climate impacts. He suggests that either they have to be treated in a non-economic way but rather as obligatory constraints for the assessment, or much higher prices (for resulting emissions) than now must be taken into account for the assessment.

Extending on this, he also states that the evaluation of time savings in traditional cost benefit analysis is often misleading. Every second of time saving is evaluated when assessing road investments, but the question of what to do with additional time, that is the utility of time savings, is neglected. His general recommendation is to apply an interrelated and holistic view that looks at the impacts and the reactions too.

On the question whether COVID pandemic actually can be a driver for changes and modernisation of urban traffic, Rothengatter had a more ambivalent opinion.On one hand there were certainly chances to improve non-motorized transport modes since the amount of work related journeys decreased due to home office. On the other side it also changed peoples’ preferences towards a more individualised mode of transportation. There were positive effects as the increased use of bike for short distance commuting but it also has led to an increased use of cars. The risk of infection and the aversion towards precautionary measures (like wearing a mask) might be the two main reasons for this behavioural change and he suspects that this change of preference will be a long lasting one. Also, it may be difficult to change this for instance with environmental arguments, since the majority of people are not altruistic in their thinking about climate change and the behavioural change that is required.

Interviewed by Jens Schade & Lisa-Marie Schaefer, TU Dresden