The value of accessibility, health, safety, inclusion and sustainability: a public willingness to pay experiment

Abstract

Many countries use Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) as an ex-ante evaluation method to support transport decision-making. A critique on CBA is that it favours policies which produce easy to monetize impacts (e.g. travel time savings), whereas it disfavours policies which produce difficult to monetize impacts (e.g. minimum level of accessibility for people with a disability and environmental effects). Public willingness to pay (WTP) experiments have been introduced to value difficult to monetize policy impacts. This paper investigates how citizens of the Transport Authority Amsterdam value nine social impacts of transport policies through five Public WTP discrete choice experiments. In the experiments, respondents were asked to choose between transport policies, trading of social impacts against a uniform tax increase. We show that participants particularly value that people can reach key facilities within 15 min and assigned a relatively low value to preventing delays. This suggests that citizens prioritize accessibility over mobility. We also observe that participants assign a significant value to all the nine social impacts and identify Public WTP metrics for all the impacts. This suggests that the Public WTP approach has to potential to resolve the critique on CBA that not all impacts can be monetized.