The main purpose of this study is to estimate the marginal costs of aviation infrastructure. But since it not exist a uniform definition of what is the cost base of the aviation infrastructure, there is also a discussion of what costs should be included. An additional purpose of the study is to relate the estimated marginal costs to today's pricing and to investigate whether aviation pays its socio-economic costs.
Estimates of the marginal cost of utilizing (relevant) airport infrastructure and for operating airline infrastructure is being analyzed using cost data from Stockholm Arlanda Airport and the Civil Aviation Authority. The empirical approach used to analyze cost items is a regression analysis, with adjustments for month-specific variations in travel patterns, when the airport section is investigated, and taking into account regional differences for airports when investigating air traffic control in the towers.
There are some uncertainties in the study, but in the light of this, the results indicate that the average marginal cost of the infrastructure is around SEK 13 per passenger and SEK1,168 per aircraft started. Corresponding estimation for air traffic management is also uncertain, with results indicating a marginal cost of SEK 373 per flight. Furthermore, it appears that the revenue from marginal cost-based charges could not alone finance the state aviation infrastructure.
VTI has been commissioned to review the current knowledge of social marginal costs for using the country’s national infrastructure, Government Decision N2017/01023/TS. As a part of this commission VTI is asked to assess the effects of a full internalisation of external costs within the transport sector.
In this report the effects on freight transports of gods being traded within and to/from Sweden is assessed using the Swedish national freight flow model Samgods. The analysis includes calculating the appropriate levels of tax and/or fees needed for decisionmakers in the freight transport market to fully take in to account the external effects of traffic with different types of vehicles. In a second step the freight flow model is used to estimate effects on ton-kilometers transported on road, rail and sea respectively.
Results show that the resulting change in relative costs for transporting with different modes of transport will increase ton-kilometers transported by sea. A full internalization of external cost will decrease ton-kilometer transported by rail and on road. The largest decrease being calculated for rail. To fully take account for external effects track fees in Sweden will have to be four times higher. In total we estimate a small but positive effect on the climate.
The Swedish Transport Agency’s mission includes continuously improving the productivity of operations. The main purpose of the report is to lay the groundwork for following up and further developing the activities carried out. For this purpose, the results of two studies are reported. The one compares costs in contract with invoiced final cost while the other analyses the cost of contracted maintenance costs.
Finally, several minimum requirements are identified that must be placed on the information required to carry out systematic follow-up.
The Swedish Transport Administration prioritize planning future projects. This forward-looking perspective is beneficial, but it could gain a lot by incorporating a feedback loop from earlier experience within the organization. Ex post data processing, auditing and project evaluation is labor intensive and often downplayed in organizations. However, productivity follow-ups and the use of that knowledge has potential in the administration.
The purpose of this memo is to describe international quantitative studies on productivity related to issues of interest for The Swedish Transport Administration. Suggested applications can be applied in the Swedish context, but only if appropriate data is collected.
The review shows that significant work remains to be done in order to carry out quantitative analyzes without extensive manual processing. However, such work does not have to be extensive or difficult. The primary task is to create links between the various databases that already exist and to ensure that documents from the projects exist in digital form and are saved.
Such work will enable several analyzes of interest to both The Swedish Transport Administration and the international research community. In the absence of this data, it is not possible to report the productivity development over time to the taxpayers.
The problem of slow productivity growth in the road construction (and wider construction) industry is well known. The present paper suggests a means for efficiency analysis in one part of this industry, namely road surface renewal in Sweden, built upon the application of Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) techniques. The paper is novel in that it focuses on project level rather than firm or contractor level performance and takes the perspective of the inefficiency that may result from the way the contracts are specified by the highway agency’s pavement engineers (client side). We compare 233 renewal contracts tendered over a four-year period via the estimation of a cost frontier, with controls for heterogeneity between projects. Our results produce first estimates that expose substantive differences in the relative efficiency performance of different engineers within the Swedish highways procurement organisation (Trafikverket); with indicative savings of around €40 m out of a total road renewals budget in Sweden of €200 m. We also find substantial economies of scale that could, in principle, point to further cost savings if road renewal projects can be packaged up as larger projects. These client-side savings represent potentially important sources of savings in addition to those that can be achieved through the pressure of competitive tendering on the supplier side. The paper therefore illustrates how disaggregate analysis of project level information can readily be used for revealing important information about how best to frame the procurement process and thus deliver productivity and unit cost improvements over time. © 2023, The Author(s).