Nick Conroy, a fourth year MEng student on the Civil Engineering programme in the School of the Built Environment, was awarded the Chartered Institution for Highways and Transport (CIHT) prize for best dissertation.
Working with SIAS Transport Planners in Edinburgh, Nick used advanced software tools to look at the so-called €˜asymmetric value of time'. This is the idea that a monetary value is attached to time savings which is then used to judge whether new transport schemes should or should not be built. This is currently a hot topic in the transportation arena and Nick's work tapped into it. He discovered that transport users ascribe different monetary values to time that is saved compared to time that is lost, the implications of which rendered several real-life case studies as uneconomic.
Nick was supervised by Dr Guy Walker and will be sharing his results with the Institute of Infrastructure and Environment's industrial stakeholders.