The marginal external costs of car use - with an application to Belgium

The aim of this paper is to develop a quantitative measure of the marginal external costs associated with passenger car use in Belgium. It concentrates on three main external cost categories : environmental costs, congestion costs and accident costs. The structure of this paper is as follows. In section II, a simple theoretical model is presented which illustrates how the total costs per km associated with a given traffic flow change as a result of an additional passenger car km. Section III then discusses the monetary valuation of the external costs caused by this additional passenger car km for the particular case of Belgium.