Browsing by Author "Kanafani, Adib"

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    The Full Cost of High-Speed Rail: An Engineering Approach.
    (Springer-Verlag, 1997) Levinson, David M; Mathieu, Jean-Michel; Kanafani, Adib; Gillen, David M
    This paper examines the full costs, defined as the sum of private and social costs, of a high speed rail system proposed for a corridor connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco in California. The full costs include infrastructure, fleet capital and operating expenses, the time users spend on the system, and the social costs of externalities, such as noise, pollution, and accidents. Comparing these full costs to those of other competing modes contributes to the evaluation of the feasibility of high speed rail in the corridor. The paper concludes that high speed rail is significantly more costly than expanding existing air service, and marginally more expensive than auto travel. This suggests that high speed rail is better positioned to serve shorter distance markets where it competes with auto travel than longer distance markets where it substitutes for air.
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    The social costs of intercity transportation: a review and comparison of air and highway
    (Taylor & Francis, Ltd, 1998) Levinson, David M; Gillen, David; Kanafani, Adib
    This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the literature on the measures of social costs, providing an indication of the state of engineering and economic literature. We operationalize the new thinking about which externalities seem appropriate to consider in an analysis of the transportation system. We construct measures of each externality: noise, air pollution, accidents, and congestion for the highway and air transportation modes, where possible as a function of the amount of output or use, rather than as simple unit costs. We find that noise is the dominant cost of air travel, followed by congestion, air pollution and accidents. For highway travel, accidents are the most significant cost, followed by congestion, noise, and air pollution. The social costs of highway travel are about 15 percent of the full cost of a highway trip, while the smaller social costs of air travel are only 5 percent of the full cost of an air trip. A highway trip generates four to five times as much externality as an air trip.