The role of safety in highway investment appraisal for developing countries

Abstract The high and rising toll of death, injury and material damage caused by traffic accidents has become a matter of serious concern both to politicians and to professionals involved in transportation planning and project appraisal in developing countries. As a consequence, transportation planners are showing an increasing awareness of the need to evolve rational, systematic procedures for taking account of safety effects in highway investment appraisal for such countries. The systematic analysis of safety in highway investment appraisal has two fundamental aspects: (a) Estimation of the effects of different projects and design features on accident rates. (b) The specification of a decision criterion or procedure which will allow the effects estimated in (a) to be incorporated in project appraisal. This paper considers the various different ways in which safety effects, once estimated, might be evaluated in the course of project appraisal. It is argued that if inconsistency and allocative inefficiency are to be avoided, then explicit monetary costs of accidents and values of accident prevention are required. The paper then proceeds to examine the way in which such costs and values might be defined and estimated.