A fair method for the calculation of the external costs of road traffic noise according to the Eurovignette Directive Enrique Moliner ⇑ , Rosario Vidal, Vicente Franco Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain article info Keywords: Road traffic noise Eurovignette Directive Noise weighting factors Strategic noise maps abstract This paper presents calculations of the costs of road traffic noise in Europe that include the development of improved noise weighting factors according to vehicle class, speed and time of the day. The Eurovignette Directive allows EU Member States to levy infrastructure charges to compensate for the external costs of noise caused by heavy goods vehicles. Here we outline a method to calculate such costs in accordance to the Eurovignette Directive, which requires using weighting factors both for vehicle classes and times of the day. The Directive does not provide specific values or guidelines for calculating these factors. More- over, while the Directive only focuses on the charging of heavy goods vehicles for day and night, we extend the calculations to other vehicle classes and time periods. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Pricing instruments for the internalisation of external costs of transport have been implemented through a number of EU Directives. The Eurovignette Directive (European Commission, 1999) was initially adopted to allow EU Member States to charge heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) for the use of motorways to cover construction, maintenance and operation costs. It was later amended (European Commission, 2006) to extend the charges to all roads in the trans-European road network and to allow a limited differentiation of charges according to the amount of congestion and certain environmental effects. It also mandated the development of a reliable model for the assessment of all external costs to serve as the basis for future calculations of infrastructure charges. To this end, the European Commission commissioned the IMPACT project (Maibach et al., 2008), which provided an overview of the state of the art and best practice in the estimation of external costs. Based on this overview, the Eurovignette Directive was amended (European Union, 2011) to allow Member States to charge HGVs for the costs of air pollution and noise, providing methods for calculating these costs; e.g. the average noise costs per vehicle- kilometre differentiated according to type of road, vehicle class and time of the day. Two types of road are distinguished: suburban roads are subject to higher noise costs because of their close proximity to populated areas, whereas interurban roads are subject to lower noise costs. Calculations use weighting factors for vehicle classes and times of the day to allow for differentiation in noise costs. The 2011 revision of the Directive, however, does not provide guidelines for the calculation of the weighting factors. Moreover, each Member State can only determine a specific charge for each combination of type of road, vehicle class and time of the day. The Directive applies a top-down approach to calculate the noise costs for each road type, meaning that it uses aggregated data from a large set of roads of the same type to compute the total costs, which are then divided by the traffic on the roads to obtain the average costs for each road type. Here we consider a bottom-up approach allowing more detailed differentiation by vehicle class, speed and time of day. 1361-9209/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2013.05.007 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 964729252. E-mail address: kike.moliner@gmail.com (E. Moliner). Transportation Research Part D 24 (2013) 52–61 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Transportation Research Part D journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/trd