Anciaes, PR; Jones, P; (2016) Valuing the impacts of road traffic on local communities. Presented at: NECTAR meeting on the wider economic and social impacts of transport networks, Molde, Norway.

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Abstract

The valuation of the negative impacts of motorised traffic on local communities is often limited to environmental aspects such as noise and air pollution. There is growing evidence on the benefits of investments to promote walking, but seldom in the context of policies to reduce the impacts of traffic. Methods to value subjective aspects such as wellbeing and social cohesion remain relatively scarce. The objective of this paper is to value the cumulative impacts of road traffic on local communities. The approach used was to collect data about the effects of two roads in London using a variety of methods and combine indicators of the magnitude of those effects with the corresponding monetary values available from the literature. Traffic levels and speeds and pedestrian crossing delays were obtained by a video survey and combined with unit values for the health effects of air pollution and noise and for the walking time of trips to public transport. The quality of the pedestrian environment was assessed using street audits. The resulting scores were combined with values from stated preference studies and from hedonic studies of housing markets. A household survey provided information about averted walking trips and social contacts due to road traffic. This data was combined with values for the effects on health, subsidies for public transport, local retail shops, social exclusion, and social capital. Alternative intervals for the overall cost of traffic were constructed, based on different sources for the unit values of each impact. Those intervals were compared with the values obtained by a stated preference survey in two study areas where participants were asked to choose among alternative scenarios for road design and traffic characteristics. The analysis revealed differences between the values obtained in each area and between those found in the accounting of cumulative impacts and in the stated preference survey. These differences are explained by the characteristics of population and land use in each area.

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