Estimating the willingness-to-pay for road safety improvements

The value of road safety is the fundamental input in social cost-benefit analysis of road safety schemes. It is also an increasingly important input in the social evaluation of almost any transport infrastructure project. This value is given by the amount that people are willing to pay for reducing the risk of a becoming a fatal victim or of suffering a serious injury. Traditionally, road safety willingness-to-pay has been estimated by means of contingent valuation and other surveys without making explicit reference to a particular travel demand context. The paper advocates the use of stated choice techniques that allow one to recreate the context of a particular trip customized to the respondent's past experience. For this and other reasons, it is argued that the proposed method is clearly superior to previous methods for estimating people's willingness-to-pay for improved road safety. The paper also provides a summary of the Chilean experience on road safety valuation using stated choice techniques; and it concludes by showing the importance of conducting local studies to elicit people's willingness to pay for safety.