Impacts of Motor Vehicle Operation on Water Quality: Clean-up Costs and Policies

This paper describes how environmental studies of motor vehicles typically focus on air pollution or noise pollution and ignore water pollution. This paper investigates the costs of reversing some of the environmental impacts of motor vehicle transportation on surface waters and groundwater. The estimates of the cost of cleaning-up leaking underground storage tanks range from $6.5 billion to $19.6 billion, while control costs for highway runoff from major arterials in the United States are an order of magnitude larger (from $45.3 billion to $249 billion, all in 2005). Some causes of non-point source pollution were unintentionally created by regulations or could be addressed by changing the design of motor vehicles. Effective clean-up policies should emphasize prevention, coupled with public education, enforcement, and economic incentives. In general, preventing water pollution from motor vehicles would be much cheaper than cleaning it up.

• Corporate Authors:

  World Conference on Transport Research Society

  Secretariat, 14 Avenue Berthelot
  69363 Lyon cedex 07,   France 
• Authors:
  • Nixon, Hilary
  • Saphores, Jean-Daniel Maurice
• Conference:
  • 11th World Conference on Transport Research
  • Location: Berkeley CA, United States
  • Date: 2007-6-24 to 2007-6-28
• Publication Date: 2007

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: CD-ROM
• Features: Appendices; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 39p
• Monograph Title: 11th World Conference on Transport Research

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Environmental impacts; Environmental policy; Groundwater; Incentives; Motor vehicle operations; Regulations; Runoff; Water pollution; Water quality management
• Uncontrolled Terms: Surface waters
• Subject Areas: Environment; Highways; I15: Environment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01126617
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Apr 17 2009 9:56AM