The role of attitudes in accounting for self-selection effects

The combined transport and land-use system allows people to travel between activity locations (home, work, family and friends, sports and other recreational locations, etc.). And it allows companies to transport goods in their several stages of production and distribution between related locations. But transport comes at high costs. First, transport costs time and money. In most Western countries people spend 10–15 percent of their income on transport (Schafer and Victor, 2000). On average, and at the aggregate level (e.g., all persons in one country), people travel between 60 and 75 minutes per person per day, in almost all countries worldwide (Mokhtarian and Chen, 2004; Zahavi and Talvitie, 1980; Szalai, 1972). Second, the transport system causes negative impacts on society. Impacts include travel time losses to other users in case of congestion, safety impacts, and environmental impacts. Even for a small country like the Netherlands the costs of congestion, safety and the environment are as large as 14.8–25.3 billion euros (KiM, 2009), around 1.9–3.3 percent of GDP. In the United States the cost of congestion alone in 2010 was estimated to exceed $100 billion (Schrank et al., 2011). Third, transport infrastructure is expensive. Large infrastructure projects often costs billions of euros, and budgets of Ministries of Transport constitute a large share of government budgets in many EU member states and elsewhere.