PEAT
Estimate Benefits and Costs of Transportation Investments
The Priority Economic Analysis Tool (PEAT) is designed to help agencies prioritize competing investment alternatives. PEAT enables agencies to analyze preservation and improvement projects for highways, bridges, and intersections using an economic approach that considers both agency and road user costs. PEAT helps answer two fundamental questions: 1) is a project a good investment; 2) and if so, when should it be implemented? PEAT has been adapted successfully by the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario.
Sample PEAT output.
Benefits
- Enables agencies to make effective investment decisions based on a life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA)
- Helps agencies justify projects based on objective measures of economic benefit – net present value and benefit/cost ratio
- Enables the direct comparison of projects involving different asset types (pavements, bridges, and intersections) and different work types (preservation and improvement)
- Promotes consistent project estimates across an agency
Features
- Estimates initial construction costs, future agency costs, travel time costs, vehicle operating costs, accident costs, and user costs associated with work zone delays
- Compiles the best practices of established economic analysis models into an easy-to-use, flexible interface
- Provides default values for all parameters and enables overrides
- Allows three levels of project cost estimates; as a project moves through the project development process, its cost estimate improves and the most recent version of the estimate is incorporated into the economic analysis
- Presents a summary of analysis results and a breakdown off all benefits and costs by year, for up to a 30-year planning horizon
Additional Information
For additional information, contact Joseph Guerre, Principal, 617 354 0167.
