Transport Scotland Scottish Trunk Road Infrastructure Project Evaluation - 1YA Evaluation Report for A77(T) Park End to Bennane

2 Introduction

2.1 Background to Project Evaluation

Road infrastructure projects normally take a minimum of 5 to 7 years to plan prior to the commencement of construction and it is not possible to know exactly what will happen when a project is opened, nor what would have happened had the project not been built, particularly when the project is opened a number of years after its assessment.

The Scottish Trunk Road Infrastructure Project Evaluation (STRIPE) Guidance by Transport Scotland sets out the requirements for evaluation. The document was finalised in 2013 and acts as a guide to evaluation for relevant projects. STRIPE states that generally two programmed evaluations should be carried out on relevant schemes, as follows:

• A One-year After Opening Evaluation (1YA) - prepared one year after opening, this report should provide Transport Scotland with an early indication (as far as is practicable) that the project is operating as planned and is on-track to achieve its objectives.
• A Detailed Evaluation - 3 or 5 years after opening. This second evaluation "considers a project's impacts, whether it has achieved its objectives and reviews the actual impacts against forecasts and determines the causes of any variances".

STRIPE reflects the evaluation requirements of the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges (DMRB), Volume 5, SH 1/97 'Traffic and Economic Assessment of Road Schemes in Scotland', which are as follows:

• to satisfy the demands of good management and public accountability by providing the answers to questions about the effects of a new or improved road;
• to identify the strengths and weaknesses in the techniques used for appraising projects, so that confidence in the roads programme is maintained;
• to allow the predictive ability of the traffic or transport models used to be monitored to establish whether any particular form of model is consistently more reliable than others when applied to particular types of projects; and
• to assist in the assessment of compensation under Part 1 of the Land Compensation (Scotland) Act 1973 for depreciation due to the physical factors caused by the use of public works.

STRIPE is consistent with the principles of monitoring and evaluation set out in the Scottish Transport Appraisal Guidance (STAG). STAG advocates evaluation against indicators and targets derived for the Transport Planning Objectives originally set for the project, STAG criteria (Environment, Safety, Economy, Integration and Accessibility & Social Inclusion) and relevant policy directives, the aim of which is to identify:

• whether the project is performing as originally intended;
• whether, and to what extent, it is contributing to established policy directives; and
• whether the implemented project continues to represent value for money.

2.2 Evaluation Reporting

As recommended in STRIPE, this report constitutes a One-Year After Opening (1YA) Evaluation Report. It is a standalone report on the A77(T) Park End to Bennane project. This project fits the criteria for evaluation at this stage, as it cost over £5m and was completed and opened to traffic in the 2011/12 financial year.

Table 2.1 Summary details - A77(T) Park End to Bennane

Route	Project Name	Standard	Length (km)	Open to Traffic
A77(T)	Park End to Bennane	WS2+1	2.9	July 2011

Key:

WS2+1

Wide Single 2+1-Lane Carriageway

The location of the A77(T) Park End to Bennane scheme is presented in Figure 2.1.