The role of cost-benefit analyses

To overcome resistance to change, which will also be caused by questions of cost, objective data and facts are needed that show economic savings generated by these measures to be higher than their costs.

Table 3 shows the socio-economic costs of young driver fatalities in OECD countries. The costs include medical costs, production loss, settlement costs and loss of quality of life (also referred to as 'human costs' or 'human losses'). For most European countries a standard European value is used (corrected for differences in purchasing power), as proposed by the ECMT. In addition, country specific values have been used for non-European countries. The calculations indicate that the total costs of young driver fatalities in the countries mentioned are about 20 billion euros (price level 2004). A large part of these costs, about 14 billion euros, are human losses. The other costs (medical costs, gross production loss and settlement costs) are about 6 billion euros. Note that victims of young driver crashes killed along with the young drivers are not incorporated into the calculations in Table 3, nor are the costs of injuries. Thus, obviously, the full costs of young drivers’ crashes will be much higher [27].

These calculations can be used to carry out cost-benefit analyses, in which the costs of measures are compared to the savings that will result from the measures. As yet, in the field of young novice drivers no such cost-benefit analyses have been carried out.