An econometric analysis of motorway renewal costs in Germany

This paper analyses the cost bahaviour of motorway renewal costs with the aim to derive an estimate of marginal infrastructure costs per vehicle-km of trucks as part of optimal road user charges. The analysis is based on cross-sectional data of motorway renewal costs and traffic volume per motorway section in Germany during the period 1980-1999. The translog model estimated in this paper includes the factor input prices for labour, material and capital, the average annual daily traffic volume of trucks and passenger cars with the respective second-order terms. and a set of dummy variables for regions (the German länder) as well as for the type of material used for renewal as the most explanatory variables. In contrast to this, we could not find any significant influence of the age of motorway sections, the past renewal expenditures and the climate conditions measured as days with temperature fluctuations around zero. The cost elasticity, i.e. the relationship between marginal and average costs found in this analysis ranges from 0.05 up to 1.17 with a digressive increase of marginal costs.