A New Role for Cost-Benefit Analysis in Transportation Infrastructure Investment

Encouraging greater reliance on cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as the organising framework for facilitating discursive democratic procedures is an area in which governments can reinvigorate their role in the development of transportation infrastructure and physical infrastructure in general. Examining the microeconomic foundations of the traditional CBA framework, we find them too narrow to support the promise of CBA as a useful tool to help arrive at evidentiary consensus, and, potentially, community consensus, on major transportation infrastructure projects. CBA requires an integration of advances in welfare economics, probability, discourse theory, and capability analysis. Potential implications for government infrastructure policies are explored.