Скачать или смотреть Major Transport financial failures - some of the reasons

A number of major privately constructed road projects with some government subsidies have proved financial failures mainly due to inaccurate forecasting of traffic volumes. While not referring to any specific example, international modelling expert Luis (Pilo) Willumsen gives some ideas on what can go wrong.
The projects were given with too much emphasis in who provided the most financially attractive proposition to the government and that team took the project. Usually that meant somebody who could be a very cheaply, not often the case, or somebody who can be extremely optimistic about the future traffic and revenue from that particular project.
And the government should not accept bids which are overly optimistic because at the end of the day it is the little pensioner who pays for that or the future pensioner who pays for that and that is not looking after the welfare of the citizens.
Actually, preparing a bid is a very expensive exercise for a group and you win it by being over optimistic. There is a lot of perverse incentive to be over optimistic particularly if you lost one or two or three bids. You spent $30 million and you got nothing. You tend to have a lot of incentives to be over optimistic. In my experience bidders and sometimes banks are very clever in encouraging consultants to also be over optimistic.
Pilo is a key note speaker at the 2017 AITPM National Conference.