What are Australians willing to pay for road safety?

One technique used in cost-benefit analysis is termed willingness-to-pay (WTP), in which a survey is used to ask people directly how much they would be prepared to pay to secure the benefits of a reduction in the risk of mortality and morbidity. This study was a preliminary assessment of the feasibility of using WTP to value road safety measures in Australia. The results show that this sort of survey is feasible. However, problems of response rate, comprehension of risk, skewed distribution of values and wide variation remain. These problems may be a function of the size of the sample used in this study or its characteristics. A larger, more representative, study of this kind would yield data useful in planning road safety interventions in Australia.