Developing measures of the full costs of transportation for various modes and services is an important policy research item in Europe, North America, Australia and several other countries. The present paper looks beyond the immediate challenging issues in developing estimates of the full costs of transportation, to identify some of the subsequent issues we expect will arise once reliable measures of full costs are obtained. This is necessarily a speculative paper, posing questions and teasing out some implications more than answering them, but it is important that some of these broader and/or longer term issues begin to be addressed. This paper only briefly addresses the challenges of assembling the financial costs associated with transportation. We focus primarily on the problem of externalities or circumstances where prices and costs diverge in the economy, and consider the implications for the application and implementation of full cost pricing of transport infrastructure and services. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E214666.
Samenvatting