Always pleased to find a fellow seeker-after-truth, Perseus, but as far as I can discover the original report is not available on the Internet. You can order it from BTRE direct, apparently, by email addressed to btre@dotars.gov.au

I would do it myself but i) by the time it arrives, the forum will have moved on and ii) life's too short.

I wonder if Mr Wharton has actually read it himself - after all, it was his reference - and will perhaps enlighten us?

Mr Wharton? Over to you.

Seeker of truth? I just like to outwit Gorgons and decapitate Medusa's, Pericles, it's better than sex. Seriously, I should take issue with your general contention (if I have it correctly) that the notion of 'costs' should be limited to actual exchanges of money. I think it is entirely appropriate to cost the time people spend in traffic at the hourly equivalent of average weekly earnings (AWE)even though no money has changed hands.

Some could argue that an extra 15 minutes sleep-in for a working parent is far more valuable than the AWE equivalent whereas an extra 15 minutes for the "Big Brother" audience would have questionable value indeed.

What we do know is that in large cities the methodology for assessing the priority of government expenditure is quite different to that used to assess regional expenditure. Regional expenditure tends to be based on a purely cost recovery basis while urban expenditure need only cite the opportunity cost of not making the outlay.

The airport railway lines in Brisbane and Sydney are good examples. These new lines were never going to pay their way because the minimum standard of such infrastructure was way beyond the likely revenue streams. But the mere promise of less congestion on adjacent roadways was more than enough to swing the necessary public opinion behind these projects.

Clearly, leisure time forgone has a value the same as work time foregone has an impact on business efficiency and profitability. They must both be valued in analysing congestion.

If you find decapitating Medusa is better than sex, Perseus, you are in serious need of a vacation to readjust your perspective. Breakfast at your place must be a nightmare...

You are right, my contention is that if you are going to measure a problem by its dollar cost, it is only reasonable that these should be in the form, as you put it, of actual exchanges of hard currency. My reasoning is that dollars are precisely, and only, dollars.

If you want to measure inconvenience, like an extra fifteen minutes in traffic, or dying early, that has a wildly fluctuating value from one person to the next - as you also rightly observe. To then select an entirely arbitrary yardstick such as AWE that will give you a dollar figure, simply for the sake of having a dollar figure, is thoroughly misleading. I might spend that extra time(in the traffic, that is, not dying early) learning a foreign language, which would render the time actively useful, and offsetting notional dollars elsewhere to turn a net profit.

The reason it is misleading is that the dollar figure will then be treated as real. If a spending proposal is then produced that "uses" these savings, it will be regarded as cost-justified, when in fact it is - I strongly suspect - based on pure unquantifiable convenience factors.

Real men don't take vacations, Pericles, they accumulate them so they can have serial mid-life crises.

You appear to be arguing for the blanket exclusion of the assumption in any analysis. I agree with most of what you have said in relation to 'remoteness of cause and effect' but add the qualification that assumptions do have a role in understanding the cost of policies, whether you like them or not. The question is, of all the assumptions that could be employed to enable consideration of a fact that is difficult to determine accurately, which one is most valid. And until a more appropriate assumption is provided, one can quite reasonably use AWE as a basis for costing wasted time.

Thanks for the lead on the report. It is serious grist for my mill.

I have just acquired the source reports on this, Pericles, and can say that the methodology is reasonably sound. Appendix XIII does conclude with a caution in respect of the degree of uncertainty. But it should also be noted that this analysis does not consider the actual costs of new roads that are demanded by an expanding population nor the exponentially higher cost of widening urban roads.

It does calculate the cost of time spent in traffic on both a fuel cost and a total cost basis. The overall national (fuel based) value of commuter travel time was $15.19/hour. And this was validated by modelling of propensity to pay, or not pay, a toll of $x to save time in transit. It represents what the community is willing to pay to avoid congestion.

So while you suggest that only actual transactions should be costed, this methodology would put this valuation on the same basis as the listed share price of a listed company. It does not require every share to be traded for the market to determine the value of every share.

Motorists wear 100% of the cost of congestion. To slug them with an extra cost in the way of a tax hardly seems fair