Costs per casualty
What does a casualty 'cost'?
In cost-benefit studies the costs per casualty or per crash are particularly important. In order to calculate these, an examination is made of how the costs are divided among the various casualty and crash groups. This calculation shows that the costs of one road crash death in the
At the total cost of approximately €4.7 billion, the large number of in-patients is the highest expense for society, whereas the Material Damage Only crashes at a total amount of €3.9 billion also account for a large proportion of the costs. The cost of all fatal crashes in 2003 amounted to €2.6 billion.
€11 million test
In 1997 the European Commission introduced the rough rule of thumb that every road death costs €1 million and that, therefore, a measure is economically justified if it costs less than €1 million per prevented road death. This rule assumes that the measure will also reduce the number of injured and the amount of material damage. However, this '€1 million test' is based on an 'average' European country in 1995, on registered crashes only, and only on 'hard' economic costs. If the non-registered crashes and the human costs were also included, a road death would cost €3.6 million. This amount is considerably higher because far more costs are included and not because the number of road deaths increases, as they are practically all registered.
If we make the same calculation for the
An €11 million test is in fact a fast cost-benefit analysis. It is, however, limited because it includes only one safety effect, i.e. deaths saved, and does not take side effects such as pollution and exposure into account. SWOV recommends only using this method in the