The road crash costs of approximately € 27 billion (€ 15 - € 36 billion) are significantly higher than other social costs related to traffic: the costs of congestion are estimated at € 3.5 to € 4.6 billion (main road network only) [3], and the costs of environmental damage due to road traffic at € 7.3 billion (source: KiM, personal communication; edited by SWOV [i]). Similar to road crash costs, the costs of environmental damage have a broad bandwidth (€ 5.7 to € 18.1 billion).
Figure 7. Estimated social costs related to traffic, 2018 (KiM [3]).
Congestion costs are not just the costs of direct loss of travel time, but also the costs of unreliability of travel times, adaptation of travel behaviour to congestion (detours, other times of travel etc.) and indirect costs, such as effects on public transport. Environmental costs are the costs resulting from air pollutant emissions, CO2 emissions and noise pollution, such as costs of health damage and damage to buildings [23]. Particularly the costs of CO2 emissions are uncertain and are the cause of broad fluctuation margins.
[i] KiM calculated the costs for 2018. The costs are expressed at the 2020 price level by correcting for inflation (consumer price index; source: Statistics Netherlands, Statline). Congestion costs were also adapted to labour cost developments (source: Statitstics Netherlands, Statline) with an income elasticity of 0.5 (see [22]). The effect of the Covid-1 pandemic on congestion costs was not incorporated.
