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Transportation projects must compete for scarce financing and
convince stakeholders of maximum financial and societal returns. 
But the valuation is complex and often incomplete. Significant
elements of public value are discounted, not quantified, or
overlooked. For example, the effects on public health to low-income
transit-adjacent neighborhoods, the societal costs of local and
global air pollutants, transportation time savings, reliability,
increased transportation safety, job and tourism generation
benefits, and/or increased recreational and property value, are
often not factored in or are left to subjective evaluation. This
makes impartial comparisons of greener or more community-oriented
projects with traditional projects an exercise in comparing apples
with kumquats.

California’s transportation projects – and other infrastructure
such as water and buildings -- would benefit from a collaborative,
transparent and rapid solution to prepare analyses and reporting of
“triple bottom line” values – economic, social and environmental
costs and benefits built into the design process.

Custom economic and risk-assessment studies that are meant to
resolve this complexity are available from large engineering
consultancies but are very expensive and tend to be one-off efforts
that end up having little relationship to what is ultimately built.
 

As of last year, that had changed. This type of analysis is now
automated in the form of cloud-based software which dramatically
reducing the price by a factor of 95%; makes the analysis
accessible to non-experts; and is far more likely to influence the
ultimate (by allowing for real-time iteration) design rather than
simply languish on a shelf in the design team’s meeting room. The
tool – named Autocase and built by a team of expert economists at
the mission-driven firm Impact Infrastructure - is available for
free in spreadsheet form or commercially at $2k/year for an
unlimited number of projects. Autocase is agnostic as to which
software tools are already being used on a given project, so can
plug into any design or engineering process. The tool is designed
for utmost transparency in assumptions, including an extensive
bibliography of the research literature it draws upon to provide
default data fields. Lastly, it can be utilized at the very early
stages of conceptual planning through detailed design and even into
operations and it can handle – or be customized to handle --
different types of infrastructure projects, meaning the State of
California could recommend its use across the transportation,
buildings, and wet infrastructure sectors.

Critically, non-expert users such as the general public can
interpret the results, or even run analyses themselves, without
extensive training. This would be a powerful complement to the
State of California Treasurer’s groundbreaking “Debt Watch” online
tool for tracking public debt issuances, and a key tool in
achieving Treasurer John Chiang’s goal to prioritize
“transformational investments, such as boosting energy efficiency
in commercial buildings, installing electric vehicle charging
stations”.

Lastly, by quantifying the full value of transportation and other
infrastructure projects in risk-adjusted dollar terms – the
vernacular of investors – California would unlock the trillions of
dollars in private and institutional capital currently hesitant to
invest in infrastructure. This would be the biggest step imaginable
towards addressing the State’s $294 billion gap in transportation.