Report

Handbook on the External Costs of Transport – Version 2019

The Handbook on the external costs of transport presents the best practice on the methodology to estimate different categories of external costs of transport. Additionally, it provides an overview of state of the art input values (e.g. the value of time or the value of a statistical life) that can be used to produce estimations of external costs by users of the Handbook themselves. Finally, the Handbook presents total, average and marginal external cost figures, which can be used directly by the users.

The 2019 version of the Handbook is an update of the 2008 and 2014 versions. Any new evidence that has become available on the methods and input values for estimating external costs of transport in research and policy since 2014 has been taken into account.

The Handbook provides methodologies and figures for all main external costs of transport, i.e. accidents, air pollution, climate change, noise, congestion, well-to-tank emissions and costs of habitat damage. All relevant transport modes (road, rail, IWT, aviation and maritime transport) are considered for all EU Member States, Switzerland, Norway, Japan, the US States California and Missouri, and the Canadian provinces Alberta and British Columbia.

The 2019 version of the Handbook has been developed in the study ‘Sustainable Transport Infrastructure Charging and internalisation of Transport Externalities’ commissioned by the European Commission DG MOVE. The objective of this study was to assess the extent to which the ‘user pays’ and the ‘polluter pays’ principles are implemented in EU Member States and in other developed countries. More information on the other deliverables produced within this project can be found here.

Authors

Co-authors

Daniel Sutter, Cuno Bieler (INFRAS)

Silvia Maffii, Marco Brambilla, Davide Fiorello, Francesca Fermi, Riccardo Parolin (TRT)

Kareen El Beyrouty (Ricardo)