Estimating the Benefits of Traffic Calming on Through Routes: A Choice Experiment Approach

Excessive speed is a major contributory factor in a large proportion of deaths and serious injuries on British roads. One approach to tackling the speeding problem is the use of traffic calming measures as a means of enforcing speed restrictions along roads running through populated areas. But speed reduction is only one of the benefits of traffic calming. This paper reports the results from a choice experiment used to investigate the willingness to pay (WTP) of a sample of local residents in three English towns for traffic calming measures that would achieve a range of reductions in speed, noise and community severance. Estimations from the responses revealed that local people had a positive willingness to pay for a reduction in the negative impacts of road traffic and for more attractive, rather than basic, designs of the traffic calming measures. © The London School of Economics and the University of Bath 2002