Urban transport systems may support active transport which in turn contributes to population health and environmental sustainability. To assess where the limited resources for transport projects should be allocated, governments developed frameworks for Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) to guide investment decisions for transport initiatives. However, generally most CBA guidance refers to motorised transport with a more limited amount of guidance for assessing active transport initiatives. 

With these guidance documents for CBA of active transport initiatives, there is a lack of comprehensive understanding or comparison. This presentation reports on a synthesis of existing guidance on CBA of active transport initiatives and accompanying tools. 

The synthesis focused on publicly available guidance in high income countries. Included guidance were assessed by 2 reviewers and data were extracted with the aim of providing an overview of appraisal rules (e.g., discounting), active transport forecasting methods, impacts inclusions and calculation methods and parameters values (when available). 

The search resulted in a total of 9 guidance documents, 7 included walking and cycling and 2 only cycling. Four of the 9 guidance included an excel or web-based tool. In general, 20 to 40 years were recommended as the appraisal period. Discount rates for future impacts ranged from 3.5% to 7%, with 1.5% applied in one case for health benefits. Most of the guidance defined the base case as the minimum level of investment required to maintain the current level of service. Active transport demand modelling methods include inference from other projects or observed travel demand from travel surveys. All the guidance included impacts on physical activity. Eight included road trauma and 6 included greenhouse emissions. Other included impacts are: journey quality (3), maintenance (5), decongestion (4), vehicle operating costs (5), indirect tax (1), air quality health impacts (5), noise (4), travel time (6) and transport fares (2).