The proper assessment has been done, as per the requirements for Business cases. The optional assessment of wider economic benefits hasn’t been done, because no party offered to provide an estimate of those benefits. Whether this was because they didn’t know how to calculate them, or they didn’t exist, is a matter of conjecture.
On the second point, I read this last night, didn’t understand the logic, assumed I was too tired and/or emotional, so slept on it hoping to understand this morning. I still don’t.
One is a piece of research that says the high price of rail travel affects students choice of university (which is hardly news).
The other is a policy that the value of a pound of cost saved or generated, or a minute of time saved, or a kg of carbon saved, or a decibel of noise reduced, is the same everywhere in the country, regardless of how it is generated. Or put another way, that a pound saved or generated is not worth more than a pound if it happens to be caused by a new transport link.
How are the two related?
Quite simply because public transport users in places such as Tavistock without a rail link, have less opportunity to take advantage of the benefits of travel, in terms of social, economic or educational activity than those who do.
It is wrong to treat road access and rail access as interchangeable when a large section of the population does not have the ability or the wealth to take advantage of the road access. Rail access should be valued more highly in these cases because it is open to more people.