Valuation of social and health effects of transport-related air pollution in Madrid (Spain)

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Abstract

Social impacts of pollutants from mobile sources are a key element in urban design and traffic planning. One of the most relevant impacts is health effects associated with high pollution periods. Madrid is a city that suffers chronic congestion levels and some periods of very stable atmospheric conditions; as a result, pollution levels exceed air quality standards for certain pollutants.

This paper focuses on the social evaluation of transport-related emissions. A new methodology to evaluate those impacts in monetary terms has been designed and applied to Madrid. The method takes into account costs associated with losses in working time, mortality and human suffering; calculated using an impact pathway approach linked to CORINAIR emissions. This also allows the calculation of social costs associated with greenhouse gas impacts. As costs have been calculated individually by effect and mode of transport, they can be used to design pricing policies based on real social costs. This paper concludes that the health and social costs of transport-related air pollution in Madrid is 357 Meuro. In these circumstances, the recent public health tax applied in Madrid is clearly correct and sensible with a fair pricing policy on car use.

Introduction

Madrid is one of the 17 Autonomous Regions in Spain, with a slow growing population, currently 5.1 million inhabitants, in an area of some 8028 km2. Its population is distributed unevenly among the city of Madrid and the outskirts; the dense core has 2.9 million inhabitants with a high density of 4700 inh/km2. The metropolitan ring comprises 1.9 million with 830 inh/km2, whereas the rest is mainly rural (0.3 million with only 57 inh/km2).

The main problems related to traffic and air pollution are concentrated in the central city and its suburbs with high density of populations and activities. There are 6,670,000 motorised trips every working day, 48% served by public transport and 52% by car. There was a growing fleet that reached 3,250,000 vehicles in 1999. A control network of 42 Air Quality Monitoring stations is distributed along the most sensitive areas (Fig. 1). They provide good quality historic data records that prove that the total level of pollutants is decreasing in general except for ozone and particles, which have increased in the last years. These can be significant variation between years, specially for those pollutants related to traffic as NOx, O3, SO2. Fig. 2, Fig. 3 highlight those results.

A clear relationship between daily curves of NOx and traffic volumes can be seen in Fig. 4, Fig. 5; both graphs show clear similarities and also the concentration of NOx during the day reflects traffic emissions impacts and the cumulative and dispersion effects. In addition, it can be seen that higher values in pollutant levels occur at monitoring stations located in the most congested areas.

Section snippets

Methodology: transport modes contributions to air pollution emissions

The Emissions Inventory of Madrid Region (Ministerio de Medio Ambiente, 2000) is based on the CORINAIR methodology and provide the data included in Table 1.

Road transport produces the main part of regional transport emissions, and it is responsible of a significant share of total emissions for NOx (80%), VOC (36%), CO (88%) and CO2 (44%). Among road transport, cars are the main polluter, although there are important contributions from duty vehicles and buses in the case of NOx, SOx and CO2.

Social and health costs related to transport emissions in Madrid Region

As a consequence of the emissions and concentration there is a potential danger for persons and the environment. The following data could confirm this point. Table 3 includes the number of times that alert thresholds has been surpassed in Madrid Region, according to the recent EU Directives 1999/30/EC and 2000/69/EC, for a number of selected pollutants. That clearly indicates that there is currently a threat for persons living in the area.

Effects on human health can be related to pollutant

Conclusions and tax policy to internalise social transport costs

This paper has shown the social costs of transport emissions in the Madrid Region in monetary terms. The total effects are as high as 357 Meuro. The most important effects are global warming and mortality. The distribution among all of them is represented in Fig. 6.

The results show that cars are the main contributors to those social costs, as it is shown in Fig. 7. Therefore it is sensible to apply taxes to car use to internalise these externalities.

In this line, the Regional Government of

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