DOI10.1068a33204b The contribution of suppressed and induced traffic in highway appraisal,.pdf

1 Introduction This is the second of two papers which address a range of substantive and technical issues relating to the investment in roads, and in particular to elasticity effects?the suppression of travel demand under increasing congestion, and induced traffic under capacity expansion. In paper 1 (Williams et al, 2001a) we established two reference states?a `do-nothing state and one based on marginal cost (congestion) pricing? against which we now assess the environmental (emission) and economic consequences of additional highway development and capacity changes. Specifically, we shall address the following questions in relation to the reference states set up in paper 1: 1. What are the contributions of elasticity effects to vehicle emissions and user benefits? 2. How does the pricing policy in force alter the environmental (emission) and economic (user) benefits derived from new roads and capacity changes? 3. Do elasticity effects improve or reduce the case for building roads to a higher capacity? We comment briefly on these issues. The elimination of stop ^ start conditions associated with congestion by increasing capacity has, for many years, been a stated objective of road policy where it has been claimed to have important beneficial effects on emissions. It is now generally accepted, The contribution of suppressed and induced traffic in highway appraisal, part 2: policy tests Huw C W L Williams Department of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WA,Wales; e-mail: williamsh@cf.ac.uk Dirk Van Vliet Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, England; e-mail: d.vanvliet@its.leeds.ac.uk Kwang Sik Kim Department of Public Administration, Sung Kyun Kwan University, Seoul, Republic of Korea; e-mail: kskim@yurim.skku.ac.kr Received 23 November 2000; in revised form 29 March 2001 Environment and Planning A 2001, volume 33, pages 1243 ^ 1264 Abstract. In conjunction with the