Deriving accident costs using willingness-to-pay approaches: a case study for Singapore

This paper reports on an innovative study where for the first time in Singapore accident costs have been derived using a willingness-to-pay (WTP) approach. In order to carry out evaluations of road safety projects and transport infrastructure investments, it is necessary to use a true value of accident cost that would reflect the community willingness to pay. Singapore has been using the traditional human capital approach, which derives a valuation of fatalities based on the discounted value of future income of an average fatal traffic accident victim. Over the last two decades, a number of countries have derived values of accident cost based on a WTP approach by applying Contingent Valuation (CV) methods. Recently, researchers in Chile and the Netherlands have pioneered the use of Stated Preference (SP) methods to derive the WTP values of statistical life and severe injury. Our work built upon this and provided the WTP value of accident costs in Singapore. This paper describes the survey, which involved more than 4,000 interviews of Singaporean residents, and included both CV and SP methods to derive accident costs in the context of urban travel. The CV and SP results were then compared. Finally, the WTP values were compared against those obtained from using the human capital valuation method, and also against other WTP accident cost values from other developed countries.