An indirect approach to estimating the drivers’ willingness to pay for speeding violations

Despite outstanding advances in automotive manufacturing and road construction industries, speeding still continues to contribute in increased frequency and severity of road crashes. Efforts to improve traffic safety have been primarily focused on safer roads and safer vehicles. In spite of these efforts, penalty charges and other sanctions have been shown to be an effective deterrent in changing road users' behaviour. Strengthening deterrence of speeding requires imposing effective penalties for non-compliance with speed limits, as well as effective enforcement of the legislation. Yet, different monetary and non-monetary penalties have been proposed for offensive drivers. The literature, however, lacks evidence on relative deterrence of existing penalties and the way the drivers respond to new forms of penalty systems. This study is among the first that investigated relative deterrence of different speeding penalties including “monetary fines”, “demerit point”, “car detention”, and “social deprivation”. A questionnaire was designed based on choice experiment method (CEM) with considerations of balance and orthogonality. Convenience sampling method was used to collect data in campuses of Kharazmi University in Karaj, College of Engineering in University of Tehran, and East Tehran Branch of Islamic Azad University. These campuses are among the largest university campuses in the country. Sample was recruited from those who had a driving license and were active drivers. A total of 550 questionnaires including 2004 choices were conducted (response rate: 91.1%). Most of respondents were male (70 percent) and aged less than 26 years old (82.6 percent). In 60 percent of cases the driving license was obtained in less than five years. 62 percent of respondents reported that they drove their cars less than 20 hours a week. 67 percent of male respondents and 29 percent of female respondents reported that they pay the traffic ticket on their own. Using an indirect approach, we conducted a mixed logit (ML) model to estimate the drivers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for non-monetary speeding penalties. Results showed that the investigated speeding penalties corresponded to disutility of committing the speeding violation, indicating that an increase in each of these penalties increases the expected cost of violating the speeding laws. Different penalties would induce different levels of different levels of disutility to commit speeding violations. Results revealed that “social deprivation” would offer stronger level of deterrence, followed by car detention, demerit point, and monetary fine, respectively. This finding is consistent with previous research showing that deterrence effect of increased monetary fines would be only of a limited magnitude, in the absence of non-monetary punishments. Results showed that compared to female drivers, monetary fines are more deterring for male drivers. Car detention was shown to be more deterring for those using their cars 20 or more hours a week. Increase in age was shown to be associated with reduced deterrence related to both monetary fines and demerit point. However, deterrence due to social deprivation increase with increase in drivers’ age. Findings recommend that future policies and procedures be not limited to increasing monetary fines, and take advantage of other non-monetary punishing mechanisms such as demerit point, car detention, and social deprivation.