ABSTRACT
In this chapter we will review the attempts which have been made to measure the costs and benefits which transport improvements confer or impose on non-users. Despite the growing attention which the costs in particular have attracted in recent years, practical work designed to place values on these costs equivalent to the values of time discussed above has been very limited. As recently as 1968, for example, the Ministry of Transport’s ‘Report on Road Track Costs’ could point to only one or two instances where evaluation of non-user costs had been attempted and these were very rough global estimates of the costs of air pollution of which part only might be attributed to vehicles. But for the purposes of decision-taking, such global sums are rarely useful, although they may serve to highlight the existence of a problem. Just as the often quoted estimates of the total of road congestion costs is of little use in deciding priorities on a particular route so are such global estimates of air pollution or noise of little help with specific policy measures to reduce them. The work considered here therefore is only that concerned with finding values which might relate to individual decisions.
