Environmental cost account: a base for measuring sustainability in transport plans

Abstract

Each city need to develop sustainable transport plans according to its future developments. This means identifying the best policy package of transport measures that could produce more sustainable future scenarios: lowest environmental impact, but also better social standards and at minimum cost. To that end, it is necessary to measure the environmental and social costs of each alternative transport mode. This paper proposes a methodology to calculate those costs in different city contexts: city centre and metropolitan suburbs. It provides a measure of the following environmental costs: pollution, noise, green house gasses and land taken. Then the social costs as congestion and accident costs. These two cost categories are calculated for each mean of transport: metro, bus, private car and taxi. The methodology has been applied to Madrid Region through modeling its mobility demand in 2004. The outputs are costs per passenger-km in each mode and Area: city centre and metropolitan ring. Therefore it is possible to assign monetary costs to environmental and social costs of each transport option; for example, car environmental costs are four times higher than buses on average, but it differs a lot from city centre to outskirt areas. Finally, some guidelines can be extracted to develop a more sustainable transport policy for Madrid Region.