Coqur. Environ. UrbanSystems Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 51-62, 1983 Printed in Great Britain 0198-971 S/83 .303.00+0.00 Pergamon Press Ltd zyxwvutsrq SIMPLE TECHNIQUES FOR INCORPORATING INSTITUTIONAL-PREFERENCE INFORMATION IN PRUGRAMMING TRANSPORTATION INVESTMENTSf- HANI MAHMASANI Department of Civil Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712 U.S.A. and RALPH ~~~~r~ Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A. Abstract-Urban transportation decisions usually involve a multiplicity of public and private institutions and actors. This paper addresses the problem of incorporating institutional preference information in a systematic manner within the methodology for evaluating trans~rtat~on alter- natives. AR approach developed in conjunction with a procedure for programming major urban transportation network improvements in Cairo, Egypt is described. It relies on a measure of relative political desirability of alternative project combinations. Different possible types of pre- ference information are compared as to information content and ease of impiementation. Alterna- tive analytical models of individual and group preferences towards project combinations under different preferential assumptions are specified and discussed. Finally, specifications are provided for their operational use in the application context for which they were intended. 1, INTRODUCTION DECISIONS concerning major transportation investments and control policies usually involve a rnul~pl~~ty of actors. These usually consist of the various agencies, organiz- ations, community groups or committees and individual decision makers, whose partici- pation is due either to their political or administrative mandate, or to their concern or interest about potential significant impacts resulting from the proposed decisions. The outcome of the decision process is thus largely predicated by the influence and political power or pressures exerted by the different actors. In such decision environments, where political considerations are of major importance, the role of technical analysis and evalu- ation of alternative options is significantly diminished, or even effectively reduced to an expensive computational ritual with little or no bearing on the actual decisions. This is further exacerbated by the fact that the current methodological apparatus is often not responsive to the realities and complexities of political considerations in transportation pr~~arn~ng and planning. Though the important of institutional and political con- siderations is quite widely recognized and accepted, virtually no efforts have been made at systematically incorporating such institutional information in the methodology (see Wilson and Schafer [l] for an exception), and thus providing a balance between the strictly technical input and the societal and political aspects, thereby increasing the relevance of technical analysis in s~ppor~ng the derision-Ming process in transporta- tion planning and programming matters. This paper addresses the problem of how to incorporate institutional-preferen~ in- formation in a somewhat formal and structured manner in the methodological frame- work of transportation systems evaluation, without making it naively oversimplified. It presents an approach., developed in the context of a procedure for programming urban t This paper is based on research conducted as part of the MIT-Cairo University Technology Adaptation Program, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The authors are solely responsible for the views and opinions expressed herein.