Oquirrah Connection Benefit-Cost Analysis

There is talk of a tunnel from southwest Utah County to South-east Tooele. There is a report on it. I'm not impressed by the BCA (benefit-cost-analysis) of the report. 

http://wfrc.org/Studies/OquirrhConnectionFinalReportAppendices.pdf

Half the benefit come from what they call "Vehicle Operating Cost Savings"

Compared with the current route to travel between Tooele, Salt Lake, and Utah counties using I80 and I-15, the Oquirrh Connection would reduce the travel distance to less than half of the No Build distance between Tooele.

This is pretty disappointing. It's pretty clear that there is an explicit relationship between trip frequency and travel time: 

 

The idea that the number of VMT is going to remain constant after such a tunnel is nonsense. The 'trip' the proposed tunnel would replace is 53 miles long. It takes 48 minutes. Say the tunnel halves that; you can reasonable expect that the number of people making that trip would double, and hence total VMT would remain the same. So half the benefit they ascribe to the tunnel doesn't actually exist. 

But it's worse than that: To get the safety improvements, they rely on the reduction in accidents per mile causes by the reduction in driving. If there is no reduction in driving, there is no reduction in accidents. So..that's 76% of the benefits. And the other 24%? Also conditioned on reduced VMT. 

Net, the Oquirrah connection would be a lot of money for ZERO benefit. Gah! 

And did AECOM consider different land use scenarios, resulting from their different transportation scenarios? Nope! The land use impacts they talk about, are when the road might have to demolish a school or despoil a natural area. No consideration the real-estate impacts.

DESPITE the fact that WFRC HAS a Real Estate Model designed to do such a thing!