Essays on Transport Economics

Abstract: Essay 1: The wear and tear of an extra vehicle that uses a road results in advancementof future repavements. This increases the present value cost of these repavements, which is interpreted as the marginal cost. Using a large data set covering all pavement renewals on the Swedish national road network since the 1950s, deterioration elasticities that express the relation between traffic intensity and the pavement lifetime are estimated and are then used to compute marginal costs. The elasticities for heavy goods vehicles and passenger cars are found to be small and marginal costs are accordingly low. Essay 2: Using observational data covering the whole Swedish national road network for the period 1998-2002, this essay estimates a set of maintenance and operation cost functions.It is found that costs for all operation and maintenance measures increase with traffic intensity, with two exceptions; total operation and winter operation measures are fixed cost activities. All other operation and maintenance measures have short run elasticities in the range 0.25-0.60. The impact of an additional vehicle is generally manifested in extra maintenance and operation costs, not only while the vehicle is using the road, but later on as well. Point estimates of long run cost elasticities are higher than one in general. Essay 3: This essay estimates the long run effects of distance work on various aspects of the activity-travel pattern. Estimations are made using econometric matching on a data material from the Swedish travel survey, RES, a travel diary collected in the period 1999-2001. The activity-travel pattern of men seems to be irresponsive to distance work, while some aspects of the activity-travel pattern of women change due to distance work. For instance, it is found that distance-working women adopt a more “local” lifestyle where purchases and child care are moved closer to home.