 The social costs of intercity transportation: a review and comparison of air and highwayDavid Levinson, David Gillen and Adib Kanafani No 199801, Working Papers from University of Minnesota: Nexus Research Group Abstract: This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the literature on the measures of social costs, providing an indication of the state of engineering and economic literature. We operationalize the new thinking about which externalities seem appropriate to consider in an analysis of the transportation system. We construct measures of each externality: noise, air pollution, accidents, and congestion for the highway and air transportation modes, where possible as a function of the amount of output or use, rather than as simple unit costs. We find that noise is the dominant cost of air travel, followed by congestion, air pollution and accidents. For highway travel, accidents are the most significant cost, followed by congestion, noise, and air pollution. The social costs of highway travel are about 15 percent of the full cost of a highway trip, while the smaller social costs of air travel are only 5 percent of the full cost of an air trip. A highway trip generates four to five times as much externality as an air trip. JEL-codes: H23 R40 R48 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Transport Reviews 18:3 215-240. Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nex:wpaper:socialcost Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from University of Minnesota: Nexus Research Group Contact information at EDIRC. |
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