Road Safety and Welfare

Doctoral thesis (2024)
Research Group
Transport and Logistics (TPM) (TU Delft)
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

2024

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Faculty

Technology, Policy and Management

Department

Engineering, Systems and Services

Research Group

Transport and Logistics

Abstract

Road crashes are a worldwide societal problem and they have a negative impact on welfare. This is reflected by several types of social costs that result from road crashes, including medical costs, loss of human productive capacities and damage to vehicle and other properties, as well as intangible impacts such as loss of quality of life and life years. This thesis is about this impact of road crashes on welfare and the socio-economic benefits of improving road safety. Understanding the impact of road crashes on welfare is important for evidence-based road safety policy making. It helps to justify road safety investments and to allocate resources efficiently.
The thesis is aimed at critically assessing the literature and current practices for estimating the impact of road crashes and road safety measures on welfare and at improving and applying methods for estimating these impacts. A combination of different methods is used, in particular literature reviews on the social costs of road crashes and monetary valuation of preventing non-fatal injuries, a survey among experts on road crash costs in European countries, a case study on the social costs of road crashes in middle-income country (Kazakhstan) and the development of a methodology for cost-benefit analysis with novel elements with respect to non-fatal injury prevention.
Estimates of the impact of road crashes on welfare are found to vary widely across countries (the equivalent of 0.4-6.0% of GDP), which is mainly explained by methodological differences. In many countries the welfare impact of road crashes is found to be underestimated due to methodological shortcomings. International harmonization of methods and developing new international guidelines for estimating the social costs of road crashes is recommended. Furthermore, the results show that non-fatal injuries constitute a major portion of the overall welfare impact of road crashes. However, they often receive insufficient attention in economic assessments of road safety. Improved methods for monetary valuation and for including non-fatal road injuries in cost-benefit analysis are presented.