Análise do fluxo de veículos e do cronograma de investimentos em concessões rodoviárias

Abstract

The economic feasibility of an investment in transportation is directly related to its demand forecast. However, several international studies have already identified the presence of bias in demand forecasts made for road and rail projects. This bias is explained by political reasons, funding disputes, modeling errors, strategic behaviour or the optimism of the planners. These systematic errors distort the assessment of projects and the decision for allocating scarce resources of society, reducing its welfare. Additionally, the nonoccurrence of the expected revenue undermines the operation of the road projects, which may cause the inability to fulfill contractual obligations. The lack of a culture of monitoring the outcomes of transportation projects after their implementation impairs the verification and estimation of the size of the bias, thus stimulating bias persistence over time. This study has established a methodology for monitoring the demand and the fulfillment of the investment schedule of Brazilian toll roads. A reference database was constructed with the collection and organization of the observed and forecasted demand in 41 Brazilian road concessions. An overestimation bias is clearly identified in the first year of operation. On average, the volume of traffic recorded in tolls reached only 71% of what was predicted in the winning proposals for the concessions. Traffic data, however, indicates a tendency of reduction in the deviations in subsequent years of operation, even though a large variability remains. The fulfillment of the investment schedule that was initially planned has not resisted unscathed by deviations in the demand. In the largest concession programs, made by the federal government and São Paulo state, the comparison between the performance of the traffic and the financial performance of the investments indicates a correlation between lower than expected demand and the delays in meeting the construction schedule. In turn, such a relationship has produced an impact that ripples through an elongated period that exceeds a decade.