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Valuing Public Investments to Support Bicycling

Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics volume 150, pages 297–329 (2014)Cite this article

Summary

We develop a framework for assessing the net benefits of investments to promote bicycling, which explicitly accounts for internal costs of bicycling. We apply our model to eight Swiss cities using data from the Swiss national travel survey and find that increasing the level of bicycling by reducing internal costs leads to inframarginal benefits that exceed the net benefits from the additional bicycling. We further find that Swiss cyclists only partially internalize health benefits, which affects the benefits from infrastructure investments but also implies that there is scope for “soft” measures that would inform users about health benefits of bicycling.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, Physical Activity and Health Unit, University of Zurich, Seilergraben 49, 8001, Zurich, Switzerland

    Thomas Götschi

  2. Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Basel, Peter Merian-Weg 6, 4002, Basel, Switzerland

    Beat Hintermann

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  1. Thomas Götschi
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Correspondence to Thomas Götschi.

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Götschi, T., Hintermann, B. Valuing Public Investments to Support Bicycling. Swiss J Economics Statistics 150, 297–329 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03399409

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03399409

JEL-Classification

  • H43
  • H76
  • Q51
  • R41
  • R42

Keywords

  • Cost-benefit analysis
  • health impact assessment
  • bicycle
  • valuation
  • internal cost
  • health benefit
  • VSL