Estimating the benefits of traffic calming on through routes: A choice expermiment 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 of a series of choice experiments that were 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. Utility difference indices are estimated from logit models based on responses to the choice experiments. These revealed that local people had a positive WTP for a reduction in the negative impacts of road traffic and for more attractive, rather than basic, designs of the traffic calming measures. Some specifications of the logit model corroborate the hypothesis that WTP for reducing the negative impacts of traffic calming is lower for local households living outside visible and audible range of the road.