External Costs of Transport in the U.S.

Abstract

Estimates of the external costs of transport may be used for several purposes: as a guide to more economically efficient pricing (given that the optimal price is equal to the private market price plus the estimated marginal external costs); as a guide to allocating research and development funds to mitigate the largest external costs; as part of a cost-benefit analysis of optimal investment in transportation modes and infrastructure; and as part of historical or comparative analyses. As indicated in Table 1, the available estimates do not fully characterize all costs for all modes. Moreover, the wide variations in estimation methods, data, and assumptions among even the “good” estimates confound the comparison of estimates across modes. As a result, we are able to make only general comparisons among modes and general statements about total costs of transport. In the following sections we review recent estimates of external costs by mode in the U. S. In each section we first review methods and issues in the estimation of the cost, and then present estimates of the costs. For each cost category (e.g., congestion delay, accidents) we summarize estimates of the cost by mode and study. Presenting the estimates in this way indicates where more research and analysis is needed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.