Transport safety’s success is highly dependent upon cooperation and continued commitment and accountability among many parts, especially the individual’s active commitment in both their contribution to the financing of the infrastructure of transport safety and their behavior to protect themselves and others. A growing empirical literature uses the individual’s remembered utility of a past life episodes to guide policy. Following this tradition, we examine the link between individuals’ experiences of traffic accidents and their current life satisfaction using data from Sweden, where since 1997 there is a continuous renewal of the commitment to transport safety work to achieve Vision Zero for serious injuries and fatalities on Swedish roads.
Using data collected during April-May 2020, when both increasing number of cases of Covid-19 and the governmental interventions for stopping the spreading of the virus, which might influence both who participated in our survey and their responses, we analyzed if it is possible to use exogenous variation in accident experience to estimate the cost of preventing traffic accidents by using the well-being valuation method.
Our preliminary results suggest that both the respondents’ household income and their past accident experiences by being themselves in an accident and/or a family member or friend have not a statistically significant impact on their current level of subjective life satisfaction. Given that these two estimates are not statistically significant, we cannot used them to calculate the monetary value of preventing road traffic accidents. Therefore, in the next step we aim to model in better details how all different combinations of experiences of first-hand accidents and and/or dead of someone known influence the individual well-being.