A benefit underrun is just as serious as a cost overrun. Either shortcoming can render a project not worth building.
Information about benefits of a project is harder to come by than information about costs. Business cases often contain very little information about the expected traffic volumes underlying the benefits counted in a road project. Expected traffic volumes for toll roads have occasionally come to light after the road is completed, often as part of a court hearing that has arisen through actual patronage being much lower than expected.52
For rail projects, it can be even harder to assess benefits. Tasked with assessing benefits from the Regional Rail Link Project, the Victorian Auditor-General's Office noted: 'Poor benefit management practices by DOT [the Department of Transport] made it very challenging, if not impossible, to measure today whether the project has delivered all its expected benefits, and thus the level of value for money achieved.'53
This report is not about benefits, because the data is so scanty, but benefits should still be borne in mind when considering the merits of infrastructure proposals. The problem with projects conceived before the pandemic is that they are likely to under-achieve their benefits, for two reasons.
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52. See Black (2014). This report relies on newspaper reports for data on expected and actual traffic volumes of road projects, because no relevant official publications were made public.
53. VAGO (2018).