I've been tasked with developing an economic impact analysis of adding several new bus routes. Besides the additional operations spending I believe user savings should be examined. Several agencies offer commuter cost savings per mile data when switching from automobile to public bus travel (basically a reduction in auto fuel and maintenance spending).

1) Would the total cost savings be run as a change (increase) in household spending?

2) And to be comprehensive, shouldn't I also run the corresponding reduction in auto fuel and maintenance spending? And if so, would the results likely be a wash, just a switch in spending behavior between categories, not an increase in economic activity?     

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    Hello!

    While the savings from people that utilize the new bus routes could be modeled as an increase in Household Income, I would tend to agree that the impact from this saving would likely be minimal when including the decrease in household spending on maintenance and auto fuel, etc. While you could certainly model both sides of these savings, one thing to consider is that IMPLAN will not allow you to change what the impacted Households would be spending their expendable income on. So when we increase Household Income using a Household Income Event, IMPLAN will automatically parse a portion of that spending to Commodities associated with those fuel and maintenance costs, as these are things that a typical Household would spend their income on (with no way to edit this manually within IMPLAN). Another option would be to create your own "Household Spending Pattern" using the Household Commodity Demand Table from Region Details>Study Area Data>Household Commodity Demand. This would allow you to create relative percentages to parse the savings values out using various Commodity Output Events, while also allowing you to remove the percentages going to Commodities for maintenance and fuel costs. You would then create additional Commodity Output Events to account for the reduction of spending on those maintenance and fuel Commodities by Households. 

     

    Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any additional questions.

     

    Best,

    Michael Nealy

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