This document contains estimates of road user unit costs in Australia at 30 September 2000. The 30 September date of compilation for this document differs from the date for corresponding previously published estimates (which was 30 June), and reflects the GST, and a range of associated tax reforms and subsidy revisions introduced by the Federal and State Governments on 1 July 2000. As a result of the changes to the tax system, methods for deriving resource price estimates were revised for this document. Separate estimates are provided for the components of vehicle operating costs, and for travel time costs and crash costs. The purpose of the estimates in this document is to provide input values for economic evaluation models used by Australian road agencies for assessing road investment proposals. Estimates are in ‘resource price’ terms, that is, the unit prices exclude indirect taxes but include subsidies, in order to reflect the real cost of road use to the community. Estimates are presented in a form suitable for use by most road project evaluation models currently being used by Australian State Road Authorities. This report also contains updated estimates of input coefficients for the ‘arterial stop start’ and ‘freeway’ vehicle operating cost models used by a number of road agencies for urban project evaluation. The estimates of unit costs associated with road crashes also reflect a recent major study conducted by the Bureau of Transport Economics (BTE Report 102, 2000). (Author/publisher)
Abstract