Valuing the Prevention of Road Accidents in Belgium

Abstract

In a recent international comparison of the social costs of road accidents, Trawén et al. (2003) noted that cost data are not available for Belgium and, by consequence, play no part in Belgian policy-making. The purpose of the present paper is, therefore, to value the costs per casualty type and per accident in Belgium. Empirical data are provided on human and economic production losses as well as on direct accident costs such as medical costs, hospital visiting costs, accelerated funeral costs, property damage, administrative costs of insurance companies, litigation costs, police and fire department costs, and congestion costs. In Belgium the marginal unit value of preventing a road casualty is estimated at €2 004 799 per fatal casualty, €725 512 per seriously injured and €20 943 per slightly injured victim. The unit cost per accident amounts to €2 355 763, €850 033, €34 944 and €2571 for fatal, serious, slight injury and property damage only accidents, respectively. These results are consistent with valuations reported in other high-income countries. Finally, the total costs of road accidents in 2002 are valued at €7.2 billion (2004 prices), or 2.6% of gross domestic product.

An analysis of official road crash cost estimates in European countries

“…Note that in some countries other cost estimates are available, for example from academic studies, and that these values may deviate from the values officially used by the government. In Belgium for example, academic studies on road crash costs have been conducted (De Brabander en Vereeck, 2007;De Brabander, 2006), but the results of these studies are not adopted in the governmental guidelines for economic appraisal (RebelGroup, 2013). Policy makers may tend to choose relatively conservative values.…”

“…For example, the European Conference of Ministers of Transport deliberately choose a value of a fatality that was lower than the scientifically most accurate estimate (ECMT, 1998). Other examples include Belgium, where a higher value of a fatality found by De Brabander (2006) was not used as a standard governmental value, and the Netherlands, where a value of a fatality at the lower bound of a range was chosen as the official value (Wesemann et al, 2005). Given these discrepancies, the present study focuses on the crash costs that are applied by the government and does not include crash costs from other sources.…”

The economic costs of the German participation in the Afghanistan war

“…In their book, Stiglitz & Bilmes (2008) use a value of $7.2 million per US life lost, but this SVL is based on US numbers. Instead, we use three European studies (De Brabander & Vereeck, 2007;Raad voor de Volksgezondheid en Zorg, 2006;Spengler, 2004), that all come up with valuations that are very similar to each other. In order for our analysis to be conservative, we use the lowest estimate of these three, which values a life at €2.05 million.…”

A Decision Support Model for Transportation Companies to Examine Driver Behavior

“…Few studies measure the exact values. Based on the research carried out in Belgium, the unit cost per RTA amounts to €2 355 763, €850 033, €34 944 and €2571 for fatal, serious, slight injury and property damage RTAs, respectively [3]. Calculating the costs of RTAs at the city level, García-Altés and Pérez [4] assessed that the total yearly costs in Barcelona were €367 million.…”