The social costs and benefits of an 'accelerated action price' in the Netherlands.

Author(s)
Teule, O.M. & Cheung, F.
Year
Abstract

Road pricing has a long history in the Netherlands. Despite several initiatives, however, it has never been implemented on a large scale. In order to solve pressing bottlenecks on the road network in the short run, it is planned to implement a tolling system on specific locations. The income ofthese tolls should be used to invest in these specific bottlenecks. The price will be based on the extra interest costs needed to speed up the construction. The feasibility of possible tolling/speeding up price projects has been studied in the fall of 2006. In this study, also an indicative social cost benefit analysis has been carried out based on indicators. The central question of this research was to what extent the social benefits of (speeding up) construction of roads in combination with a (temporary) toll/speeding up price for a number of projects would balance against the social costs. The aim of this study was to get a first indication of the possible social effects of speeding up investments in road infrastructure. In total six projects have been looked at, varying from extension of the current infrastructure to the construction of new infrastructure. Some of theseprojects were accelerated projects, some were tolling projects and otherswere a combination of both. In the cost benefit analysis the direct, indirect and external effects of a project are assessed. In this study, with respect to the direct effects, the investment costs and avoided investmentshave been looked at, as well as the operational and maintenance costs, the journey time savings by new and generated traffic, the reliability and the travel distance costs. With respect to the indirect costs the effects on the labour market and on the fuel market have been taken into account. With regard to the external effects, the effects on traffic safety, noise and air emissions were quantified. It is seen that the question whether a project is socially acceptable depends largely on the design of the variant. This also holds for the question whether the speeding up of a project isfeasible. For the covering abstract see ITRD E137145.

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Publication

Library number
C 42012 (In: C 41981 CD-ROM) /10 /72 / ITRD E136934
Source

In: Proceedings of the European Transport Conference ETC, Noordwijkerhout, near Leiden, The Netherlands, 17-19 October 2007, 6 ref.

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