Road fatalities and injuries in Egypt as well as in other developing countries constitute a major health problem second only to diseases. In spite of the deficiencies involved and the lack of standardized bookkeeping needed in order to conduct such a study, the paper gives an idea about the magnitude of the problem and the relatively high cost of accidents. Two techniques were employed to estimate the cost of accidents: the gross output approach and the courts award approach. The attempt made in this research to evaluate cost of road accidents shows it to be around US$5000 per accident for 1990 and US$8190 for 1993. Analysis carried out in this research suggests that road accidents' costs constitute about 0.76 per cent of the gross domestic product of Egypt. To account for pain, grief, and suffering, it is recommended that the "Willingness-To-Pay" approach be adopted to reflect social impacts of traffic accidents. It should be stressed that the applicability of any accident valuation method is entirely dependent on the availability of data of the appropriate kind and quality. It is thus recommended that a national accident information system should be implemented as a starting point to aid planners and decision makers in evaluating the safety impacts of various transportation policies. Finally, several remedial measures are suggested to decrease the cost of accidents.
Abstract