COSTS OF MOTOR VEHICLE ACCIDENTS AND INJURIES

Motor vehicle accident costs are an important component in benefit-cost evaluations of highway safety improvements. A recent study by Miller et al. for the Federal Highway Administration evaluated various approaches to accident cost estimation and presented state-of-the-art societal costs of motor vehicle accidents, based largely on a 1983 accident cost study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The principal shortcoming of the Miller et al. study is its failure to express accident costs in a form that can be directly used with state accident data in benefit-cost calculations. The objective of this paper is to develop accident costs that can be used directly with state accident data in benefit-cost evaluations of highway improvements. The costs in Miller et al., which were expressed in per-victim and per-vehicle terms, provide the basis for the per-accident costs developed in this paper. These accident costs are based on accident severities and on the A-B-C injury severity scale commonly used in state accident records, rather than on the Maximum Abbreviated Injury Scale (MAIS) used by NHTSA and Miller et al. Accident data from five states are used in deriving the accident costs. Data from the National Crash Severity Study (NCSS) and the National Accident Sampling System (NASS) are used to relate percentage distributions of injury severities by the MAIS and A-B-C scales. The accident costs presented in this paper can be used directly with state accident data, thereby facilitating the use of state-ofthe-art accident cost estimates in benefit-cost analyses of highway improvements.