The main purpose of this paper is to estimate and evaluate the social costs of highways in Japan. In general, with more people concerned about protecting the environment at both local and global levels, dependence on vehicular transportation in cities has brought about problems. Too much...

Using a dataset of 111 Japanese cities in 2005, the article estimates the social costs of car transport and analyses the structure of the components of and the relationship between social costs and city size. The following major results are obtained. First, the social costs of vehicular...

Unlike the expressway systems of the U.S. and Europe, where road use is largely free of charge, the Japanese expressway system consists mostly of toll roads. The toll expressway system was instituted after World War II to expedite construction of a nation-wide expressway network. Originally it...