I was recently in Copenhagen, where I gave a keynote talk at the UNITE Conference (Uncertainty in Transport Evaluation) at DTU. My thanks to the organizers for inviting me. (I really liked Copenhagen, more on that in a later post).

My talk was titled: Evaluation in a Time of Uncertainty

Abstract: We live in a world where the future is increasingly unpredictable. How should we evaluate transportation investments? Should we even try to evaluate investments in advance? What do we know about what people value? This talk will consider directions in transportation evaluation, and suggestions for better decision-making given uncertainty.

The slide deck is here.

The essential tension in my presentation is the hypothesis that essentially “Long-term forecasting is impossible” vs. my argument that forecasting can only be improved if we “Make forecasters responsible for forecasts.”