Cost Overruns and Demand Shortfalls in Urban Rail and Other Infrastructure

By Bent Flyvbjerg. 2007

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Risk, including economic risk, is increasingly a concern for public policy and management. The possibility of dealing effectively with risk is hampered, however, by lack of a sound empirical basis for risk assessment and management. This article demonstrates the general point for cost and demand risks in urban rail projects. The article presents empirical evidence that allow valid economic risk assessment and management of urban rail projects, including benchmarking of individual or groups of projects. Benchmarking of the Copenhagen Metro is presented as a case in point. The approach developed is proposed as a model for other types of policies and projects in order to improve economic and financial risk assessment and management in policy and planning.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Management Science and Operations Research, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d446e2a96f00e195f83009a83b74f6b6765cc16e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Building and Construction

1. Bert van Wee
2. Eric Molin
3. C. Cantarelli
4. Dan Lovallo
5. Massimo Garbuio
6. Bent Flyvbjerg
7. J. De Vos

In Management Science and Operations Research

1. Bent Flyvbjerg
2. Eric Molin
3. C. Cantarelli
4. Bert van Wee
5. Dan Lovallo
6. Massimo Garbuio
7. Ofer Zwikael
8. Y. Kwak

In Strategy and Management

1. Bent Flyvbjerg
2. Bert van Wee
3. Eric Molin
4. C. Cantarelli
5. Dan Lovallo
6. Massimo Garbuio
7. Y. Kwak
8. Min Liu

Citations in the corpus

• Delusion and Deception in Large Infrastructure Projects: Two Models for Explaining and Preventing Executive Disaster (2009, background): “Furthermore, for a quarter of the projects, ridership was at least 70 percent lower than estimated.(5) An appropriate slogan seems to be “over budget, over time, over and over again.”
• Cost overruns in transportation infrastructure projects: Sowing the seeds for a probabilistic theory of causation (2016, unknown): “…a much-needed stimulus for theory that can be used to explain cost overrun causation, they still remain a ubiquitous and on-going issue (e.g., Flyvbjerg et al ., 2002; Bordat et al ., 2004; Odeck, 2004; Flyvbjerg et al ., 2005; Flyvbjerg, 2007; Cantarelli et al , 2012a,b,c; Love et al ., 2015b).”
• Characteristics of Cost Overruns for Dutch Transport Infrastructure Projects and the Importance of the Decision to Build and Project Phases (2012, background): “First of all, the main reason for the differences in the average cost overrun between studies is the difference in the use of nominal and real prices (Flyvbjerg, 2007).”
• What impacts the performance of large-scale government projects? (2016, background): “…indirectly impact other performance measures such as cost (Frimpong and Oluwoye, 2003; Han et al., 2009; Lyer and Jha, 2006; Majid and McCaffer, 1998), particularly in infrastructure and capital megaprojects (Flyvbjerg, 2007; Flyvbjerg et al., 2003a,b, 2004; Merrow et al., 1988; Stannard, 1990).”