Environmental Costs Account: a base for measuring sustainability in transport plans.

Abstract

Each city need to develop sustainable transport plans according to its fu-ture developments. This means identifying the best policy package of transport measures that could produce more sustainable future scenarios: lowest environmental impact, but also better social standards and at mini-mum cost. To that end, it is necessary to measure the environmental and social costs of each alternative transport mode. This paper proposes a me-thodology to calculate those costs in different city contexts: city centre and metropolitan suburbs. It provides a measure of the following environmen-tal costs: pollution, noise, green house gasses and land taken. Then the so-cial costs as congestion and accident costs. These two cost categories are calculated for each mean of transport: metro, bus, private car and taxi. The methodology has been applied to Madrid Region through modeling its mobility demand in 2004. The outputs are costs per passenger-km in each mode and Area: city centre and metropolitan ring. Therefore it is possible to assign monetary costs to environmental and social costs of each trans-port option; for example, car environmental costs are four times higher than buses on average, but it differs a lot from city centre to outskirt areas. Finally, some guidelines can be extracted to develop a more sustainable transport policy for Madrid Region