The paper deals with the calculation of costs for road infrastructure and the allocation of these costs to vehicle types with the focus on heavy goods vehicles. It presents a comprehensive methodological comparison of existing models for calculating road capital values and capital costs and for allocating infrastructure costs to vehicle types. In the study mentioned above, the impacts of different national approaches applied in EU-member states on the quantitative results and their comparability were for the first time in Europe studied in a quantitative approach. Thus, this part of the paper gives our insights in the sensitivity of methods and parameters. The paper also discusses the issue of estimating marginal infrastructure which is of high importance in order to implement the EU White paper on infrastructure charging. Based on these extensive analyses of methodologies, the paper provides empirical results for road infrastructure costs in the EU-member states and in Switzerland for the year 1994. The analyses in the paper show that the current practice of infrastructure cost accounting in the EU member states is heterogeneous. Thus, the comparability of results is restricted. However, the sensitivity analyses identified the most sensitive parameters which are the assumed life expectancies for road assets, the depreciation methods, the assumptions on the shares of fixed, variable and weight dependent costs and the cost allocation factors. The paper concludes with identifying needs for a more harmonised methodology. However, it is important to stress that what is needed is a harmonised methodological framework which has to respect national conditions such as type of road organisation, national transport policy, road and traffic characteristics and the existing practices and data availability.
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