Costs related to serious road injuries

Costs related to serious injuries constitute an important input variable to assess the cost-efficiency of road safety measures, which is one of the objectives of the H2020 EU project SafetyCube. A survey collecting crash costs in European countries showed considerable variation in the costs related to serious injuries. The applied methodology to estimate human costs appeared to have a large influence. Other potential explanations are the applied definition, the registration procedure of crashes with serious injuries and the cost components that are included. Detailed analyses of medical costs and production loss showed the importance of assessing medical costs on the long term and taking into account the variation of these costs for different subgroups of traffic victims. To estimate monetary values for human costs, most countries use the Willingness To Pay method. While having a sound theoretical background, this method is rather limited in the specification of injuries. The use of Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) gives the possibility to provide values for a larger diversity of injury types.