COST EVALUATION OF ROAD TRAFFIC ACCIDENT IN NIGERIA USING HUMAN CAPITAL APPROACH

Thesis Abstract

Nigeria experiences the highest rate of road traffic accidents resulting in fatalities and various levels of injuries. On Abuja-Lokoja road, traffic accident takes the lion’s share of the risk having highest number of vehicular accidents with corresponding fatalities and injuries which has a great impact on cost and the socio-economic development of the society. It is therefore necessary to gauge the monetary value of these losses in order to highlight the extent of damage incurred to society as a whole. This research is focused on using Gross-Output Model or Human Capital Approach to compute the cost of traffic accident on Abuja-Lokoja road. The aim of this research is to formulate a model that can be used for estimating the total cost of road accidents at all levels of severity. The extent of injury levels, property damaged and general cost resulting from an accident using secondary data were obtained from the Polices, Research and Statistics department of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) for a period of eleven years (2000-2010).The research was carried out with the aid of questionnaires and interview. The data collected were analyzed using the percentage frequency distribution table and the result was used to cost the property damage cost and the medical cost. The accident cost was decomposed and quantified based on the accident severity levels.The cost per fatal accident is N 24, 853, 524, the cost per of serious injuries accident is N633.520, and the cost of per minor accident isN 10, 575. 36, the total human cost isN 55, 714, 330,477, the total properties cost isN 890, 067, 000, the police administrative cost isN65, 446, 757. 76 and the total accident cost is N 56,669,844,234.Therefore the cost per vehicle per kilometer is N60,804.03Km-1, the cost per kilometer is N318,369,911 Km-1for Abuja-Lokoja road. This result is in agreement with other researches carried out using gross output method.