Environmental Impact Due to Traffic: Evaluation Methods to Measure External Costs

External costs due to transport activities are quite important both in quantitative and qualitative terms in all industrial countries. In the last twenty years, these costs are taken into account, and evaluated in most European countries. Policy measures, technological improvements, as well as more administrative controls are considered to reduce the impacts of main nuisance. This is not the case for the majority of developing countries facing the Mediterranean Sea. This is one of the crucial problem because, the trends in population, vehicles and traffic growth, will make the negative impacts of the externalities unsustainable both in energy and environmental terms. The paper will present first quantitative analysis of the trends for passenger and goods transport for four countries: France, Italy, Algeria and Tunisia. This make possible to identify major problems in urban areas of these countries that lead to external costs. To account for the external costs the “top down” approach will be applied. This consists in valuing the overall damage due to externalities in terms of GDP percentage. After, the value will be spliced according to the vehicle fleets to present the damage in terms of vehicle-km. This approach allow to make evidence of the contribute each transport mode and vehicle account to the total damage. Policy measures to mitigate the impacts will be analyzed according to the cost-effectiveness analysis approach. Particular emphasis will be put on non-quantitative aspects that developing countries have to cope with when internalization process is considered. Technology options and pricing policy will be discussed as possible solutions to reduce the impacts in the four countries considered. The main nuisance considered will be air pollution. Two main reasons justify the choice: • air pollution is responsible for global, regional and local damage both to materials and human health; • being more related to the fuel-engine technology, this field leave more room to discuss the technology developments that best fit the goal of reducing the impacts. Finally, this study may contribute to understand which policy measure could better achieve the difficult task of reducing external costs in countries with growing transport activity.

کلیدواژه ها:

Transports ، External Costs ، Energy Consumption ، Environmetal Economics