Socio-economic assessment of the SAFESPOT cooperative systems - Methodology, final assessment results and deployment conclusions

This paper reports the methodology and the results of the socio-economic impact assessment of the SAFESPOT cooperative systems. Two application bundles, based on communication between vehicles or between vehicles and the infrastructure, which address the same problem areas of road safety (intersections, hazardous road and weather conditions, speed and inappropriate distance), are compared concerning their socio-economic benefits and system costs for the target year 2020. The results show that the infrastructure based bundle is slightly more effective in avoiding casualties, thus leading to higher safety benefits. The system costs are dominated by the infrastructure costs so that the lower invehicle costs of the infrastructure based system are outweighed by far. In terms of benefit-cost ratio the system based on vehicle-vehicle communication proves its efficiency whereas the vehicle-infrastructure based system is too expensive under the assumptions introduced for the assessment. In general it can be concluded that cooperative systems, especially when infrastructure comes into play, should aim towards leaner and smarter equipment at lower unit costs. Concerning deployment, it is argued that the system based on vehicle-vehicle communication looks more promising from the socio-economic perspective. The equipment of infrastructure on a limited scale, concentrating on black spots, would help to overcome the critical mass threshold of the vehicle-vehicle applications in early deployment phase.