Traffic Monitoring near Muenster
Last week, IVM's traffic monitoring on the B54 came to an end. Traffic volumes and speeds were recorded at five locations over a period of two weeks to estimate travel times. These measurements enable a detailed analysis of passing behavior on streets with 2+1 systems.
We would like to thank Tilo Voigt and Kevin Hubert (Landesverkehrszentrale NRW) for coordinating the measurements and Thomas Straub and his team (Straßenmeisterei Steinfurt) for carrying them out.
In 2023, 1.85 million conventional bicycles and 2.1 million electric bicycles (“e-bike”) were sold in Germany making it the first year in which more e-bikes were sold than conventional bicycles. This trend indicates a growing preference for e-bikes among consumers, so that it is important to study whether increasing sales would also translate into increasing usage of e-bikes. In their new 
Gernot Sieg from the University of Münster and Berthold U. Wigger from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) introduce the vehicle value externality as a previously unacknowledged cost of car traffic. Unlike established externalities such as emissions or congestion, the vehicle value externality arises from the impact of vehicle value on accident damages. By developing a model linking insurance premiums to this externality and applying it to German car traffic data, the annual aggregate cost are estimated at 10 billion euros in 2021. Since this externality has not been internalized by policy makers so far, too expensive cars are bought in Germany and therefore insurance premiums for cars are too high. The article is published in the journal