The economic cost of a 130 kph speed limit in Germany: Comment

Gernot Sieg

No 38, Working Papers from Institute of Transport Economics, University of Muenster

Abstract: Gössling et al. (2023) claim to calculate the welfare effect of a 130 kph speed limit in Germany. By ignoring tax revenues from gasoline and diesel, they overestimate the welfare gain by about 378 million Euros. A speed limit raises travel times. Gössling et al. (2023) calculate travel time increases with a simplistic approach that underestimates the costs with a magnitude of their complete (tax adjusted) welfare effect. A speed limit induces some traffic to switch mode or not to travel at all. The reduced costs of less car travel are decisive for their calculation, but the losses of consumer rent associated with reduced travel are ignored. Gössling et al. (2023) do not calculate a value that is related to the welfare changes of a highway speed limit of 130 kph for Germany.

Keywords: Highways; Speed limit; CBA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L92 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 3 pages
Date: 2023-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tre and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.wiwi.uni-muenster.de/ivm/sites/ivm/fil ... _workingpaper_38.pdf First Version, 2023 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The economic cost of a 130 kph speed limit in Germany: Comment (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mut:wpaper:38

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Institute of Transport Economics, University of Muenster Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Birgit Rueschenschmidt ().