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Colleagues This is to remind you of the next CTS seminar at UCL, which will be given by Dr Francesaca Medda, who lectures at UCL on Transport Economics. The topic will be Accessibility Without Access. We hope that you will be able to join us for this. Ben ____________________________________________________________________________ Seminar 25 March 2009 16.00, Centre for Transport Studies University College London 218 Chadwick Building Accessibility without access Francesca Medda Centre for Transport Studies University College London Abstract In the Eddington report one interesting table depicts the economic returns of various transport investments. The result of this analysis is easily predicted: road investments should always be preferred to rail investments and certainly they must be preferable to investments in fast rail. The questions that we need to ask at this point are: Is the increase and improvement of accessibility a main priority of transport investments? And if so, why are the investments shown in comparison tables not compared in relation to the accessibility that they achieve? Transport accessibility, in this work, is examined as a merit good and we therefore assume the necessity for government intervention in its provision. However, transport accessibility may be achieved through different levels of merit good values, as for instance, rail intervention versus road intervention. Some transport systems achieve greater equity in accessibility, thus a higher merit good value; this implies that social planners need to discriminate various levels of subsidy and investment in relation to equity in transport accessibility.