Eliciting Measures of Value for Health and Safety

Many transport policies and innovations are liable to have implications for human health and safety. How should such implications be weighed against the other costs and benefits? In particular, when policy makers are undertaking social cost-benefit analysis, what monetary value should be attached to any health or safety components? Standard welfare economics suggests that the answer should reflect people’s collective willingnessto-pay (WTP) for any such improvement (or their willingness-to-accept (WTA) compensation for any deterioration). But eliciting such values from the general population presents a number of practical challenges. This talk will describe some of the problems encountered in the course of several large studies conducted during the past 10 years, and consider what we have learned about the nature of people’s preferences and the possible implications for public policy in this area. Much of that work has had a transport focus, but the issues raised are relevant to a number of other areas, including environmental health, crime, safety at work and in the home, and the allocation of health care resources.