Browsing by Subject "Social costs"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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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 Full Cost of Intercity Highway Transportation
    (Pergamon, 1998) Levinson, David M; Gillen, David
    In this paper we review the theoretical and empirical literature on the cost structure of the provision of intercity highway transportation and specify and estimate our own cost functions . We develop a full cost model which identifies the key cost components and then estimate costs component by component: user costs, infrastructure costs, time and congestion costs, noise costs, accident costs, and pollution costs. The total long run average cost is $0.34 per vehicle kilometer traveled. The single largest cost category is freeflow travel time. While the marginal cost of infrastructure is higher than its average cost, indicating that new construction is increasingly expensive, the marginal cost of driving (user fixed and variable costs) is less than the average cost, indicating that by increasing travel the user can spread his fixed cost of a vehicle over more trips without penalty.
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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.