The Third London Airport as a project assessment problem: Fid-Bau Portal

The Third London Airport as a project assessment problem

Sharman, F.A.

Sharman F. A. (1971) The Third London Airport as a project assessment problem, Reg. Studies 5, 135–143. The location of additional airport facilities in south-eastern England can be described in political, economic, sociological or physical terms. In this paper the need, and various possible ways of meeting it, are shown to be dominated by forecasts of the kinds of travel available to future generations, and by the value they are assumed to ascribe to efficiency of movement in comparison to their other goals. Engineering considerations enter at the start of the analysis, and variations in the future development of, and investment in, vehicles and their paths are considered along with the social values, management techniques and political pressures that react with them at many stages of the work. The critical importance of ensuring that situations presented for comparison are optimized on a self-consistent set of cost/benefit criteria is demonstrated, and the wide variation in benefit assessment is shown to vitiate many of the narrower assessments of sensitivity in which only the more readily quantified variables have been tested. In the end, the problems are seen to be little different from those of many major projects comprehensively reviewed by the World Bank with the help of feasibility studies. It was in the form of such a study that the technical considerations were presented by a team of consultants to the eight County Councils most affected by the Roskill short-list of Third Airport sites. This work is summarized and up-dated in this paper and conclusions are stated.