The evaluation of the social costs of transport has been studied by a long number of researchers and some well-known and established methods are available in literature. The need to verify the reliability of the available data and methods used to obtain them has induced to experiment different methods to calculate the social costs of transport. So, a medium-size town has been chosen to design a survey focused to evaluate the social costs of urban transport due to resident population. This one has been designed in different sections: the first one has been defined to know the mobility of people, their behaviour and their approach towards the environment; the second one wanted to understand their willingness to pay to enter in the city centre; the third one has followed a stated preferences approach to understand the value associated to the use of the car in different scenarios. Then, the data obtained have been used to calculate the social costs of urban transport. The comparison of the data has emphasised a great difference between the results obtained with the most classical method, the contingent valuation, and the stated preferences approach, that has given greater values. These results induce to further investigate the survey design and to try to set an alternative approach in the social costs matter. For the covering abstract see ITRD E120462.
Abstract