Chapter 5 Comparing alternative pricing and revenue use strategies with the MOLINO model

Cost-benefit analysis plays a central role in planning and investment decisions related to transportation. Yet, this process is often rather obscure and difficult to control and check by an outsider. We propose here a new engineering-economic-based tool, MOLINO, to perform cost benefit analysis of transport projects and regulations in a network and multi-period context. MOLINO performs cost-benefit analysis for different transport modes and types of freight and/or passenger traffic, peak and off-peak time periods, diverse market structures (private or public monopoly or duopoly, regulated or unregulated) and various financing schemes. Congestion levels are computed endogenously. MOLINO computes costs and benefits over multiple periods and the length of the time horizon is flexible. Outputs include equilibrium values of user and social benefits, financial flows and measures of effectiveness such as congestion delays.