Road traffic accidents are one of the major social problems in Korea. The Korean government has tried to reduce the number of road traffic accidents in various ways. However, until now, no systematic safety countermeasures have been executed. In Korea, the cost effectiveness of various safety measures has not been evaluated. The main reason for the failure in evaluating the cost effectiveness of safety measures is that no systematic approach to estimate road traffic accident costs has been so far. In general, traffic accident costs are based upon social cost concept including direct loss, indirect loss, and public loss. Also, there is the third party's loss such as congestion of other vehicles due to traffic accidents. In this study, only direct, indirect, and public loss will be considered in estimating road traffic accident costs. In this study, the main purposes are the estimation of total road accident costs for each type of accident severity. (Author/publisher)
Abstract