Barry Zondag

Port competition modeling including maritime, port, and hinterland characteristics

Container transport has grown very rapidly worldwide and in the coming decades also a substantial, above average, growth is foreseen in this type of freight transport. Container transport is also one of the least captive cargo types, and ports and governments are responding to this with large investments to improve the market share of their port in this competitive market. The purpose of this paper is to present a new port forecasting approach that models port competition explicitly. The model follows a logistic chain approach and is designed to calculate the impacts of a wide range of policy measures (e.g. infrastructure, pricing) in the port itself, its maritime access and its hinterland connections. The functioning of the model is demonstrated for the ports of Antwerp, Rotterdam, Bremen and Hamburg.

Accessibility modeling and evaluation: the TIGRIS XL land-use and transport interaction model for the Netherlands

In current practice, transportation planning often ignores the effects of major transportation improvements on land use and the distribution of land use activities, which might affect the accessibility impacts and economic efficiency of the transportation investment strategies. In this paper, we describe the model specification and application of the land use transport interaction model TIGRIS XL for the Netherlands. The TIGRIS XL land-use and transport interaction model can internationally be positioned among the recursive or quasi-dynamic land-use and transport interaction models. The National Model System, the main transport model used in Dutch national transport policy making and evaluation, is fully integrated in the modeling framework. Accessibility modeling and evaluation are disaggregated and fully consistent, which is not common in accessibility modeling research. Logsum accessibility measures estimated by the transport model are used as explanatory variables for the residential and firm location modules and as indicators in policy evaluations, expressing accessibility benefits expressed in monetary terms. Modeling results indicate that accessibility changes from transport investments in the Netherlands have a significant but modest positive influence on the location choice of residents and firms. This is probably mainly due to the spatial structure and already dense and well developed transport networks, and the large influence of national, regional and local governments on the Dutch land use markets.

Coupling a Detailed Land-Use Model and a Land-Use and Transport Interaction Model

As already described in the preceding chapter, the study ‘The Netherlands in the Future; The Second Sustainability Outlook’ (MNP, 2007) constructed alternative future spatial strategies for the Netherlands and evaluated them using a diverse set of sustainability indicators, such as flooding safety, biodiversity, accessibility and landscape protection. As in previous studies, Land Use Scanner was used here as an instrument to allocate demand for land of different land-use types within a region. At a regional level, this demand had been calculated earlier by sector-specific models for the Baseline scenarios. The analytical framework was further extended with the Tigris XL model, a Land Use and Transport Interaction model (Significance & Bureau Louter, 2007). The specific objectives for using the Tigris XL model in addition to Land Use Scanner were:

Accessibility benefits of integrated land use and public transport policy plans in the Netherlands.

Major investments in public transport in the Netherlands are often considered inefficient from a welfare economic perspective. Bakker and Zwaneveld (2010) show that of about 150 social cost–benefit analyses (CBAs) of public transport projects in the Netherlands conducted in the past decades, only one-third of the projects had a positive benefit–cost ratio. These public transport projects were typically not part of an integrated planning approach, and the CBAs examined the costs and benefits of the transport projects only. In particular, the role of spatial planning or spatial developments in these CBAs was ignored or not made explicit (that is, land use is assumed to be fixed or does not differ between project alternatives). In recent years, however, integrated spatial and transport planning has received more attention in Dutch national policy-making. In 2007, a national policy document, Randstad Urgent, was published, aiming to improve cooperation between national and regional governments and create a joint policy decision-making process for different spatial projects and transport infrastructure projects that are to be realized within the same region (Ministry of Transport Public Works and Water Management, 2007). The policy document focused on 40 projects within the Randstad Area, the most urbanized region in the western part of the Netherlands. The aim of this new approach is to speed up the decision-making process and increase the social benefit–cost ratio of the projects. In this chapter, we examine the RAAM project (‘Rijksbesluiten Amsterdam – Almere – Markermeer’), the largest integrated policy project included in Randstad Urgent. The project involves adding 60 000 dwellings and 100 000 jobs and major transport investments in the corridor between Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Amsterdam and Almere, located 30 kilometres east of Amsterdam (see Figure 8.1). Almere would nearly double in size from its current 190 000 to 350 000 inhabitants by 2030. Local governments developed three spatial policy alternatives for the development of Almere with tailored public transport investment programmes. Almere is a new town built on reclaimed land (a polder) with two bridges linking two motorways (A6 and A27) and a railway (parallel to the A6) linking to the mainland. These road connections are already severely congested and rail capacity is insufficient to increase train frequencies substantially. Doubling the population of Almere is not considered feasible without major infrastructure expansion. Transport investments are thus seen of crucial importance to the future population growth of Almere.

A Population-Employment Interaction Model as Labour Module in TIGRIS XL

This chapter looks at the integration of a population-employment interaction model in the TIGRIS XL framework. TIGRIS XL model is an integrated land-use and transport model and is actually a system of sub-models (or modules) that allows for dynamic interaction between them. Currently, the population module responses to lagged changes in employment and the employment module responses to contemporaneous changes in population. Thus, the change in population mainly drives the change in employment—an assumption which, given the strict Dutch restrictions on population location, is not entirely unrealistic. We, however, argue that this assumption is too harsh, and that sectoral employment change might be more dependent upon employment change in other sectors than on population change. We, therefore, test and estimate such relations and conclude indeed that for some sectors the employment dynamics in other sectors are more important than population changes and propose an adapted version of the labour module in TIGRIS XL. The new methodology within TIGRIS XL is assessed by looking at a (stylized) case study. This study concerned the doubling of the size of the new town Almere located 20 km east of Amsterdam. About 60,000 dwellings are to be built and 100,000 jobs are to be added in the period up to 2030. The accessibility benefits of a particular land use planning variant, with a tailored public transport investment alternative, are examined for the new labour module in TIGRIS XL. Both models predict, in case of the construction of 60,000 dwellings, a number of additional jobs much lower than 100,000. The model results of the new module shows that the population-employment interaction model reacts slower and on shorter distances on population changes than the old model. Thus, employment does not seem to mold that easily to population changes as earlier Dutch employment models have predicted.

Spatial Elaboration of Long-Term Economic and Demographic Trends: Future Land Use in the Netherlands

This chapter describes three different, exemplifying strategic policy studies in the field of spatial planning and sustainability in the Netherlands at national and regional level. Spatial scenarios and simulations played a different role in each of them. In the first study spatial scenarios and simulations were used to explore the range of potential spatial dynamics and to analyse their differences. The second study analysed the sustainability impact of probable future changes in land use and transport and investigated how both could be optimised to reach specific aims in sustainability policies. Finally, in the third study spatial scenarios and simulations served to facilitate the interactive process of policy preparation with decision-makers and stakeholders. Each scenario study requested a different use of the Land Use Scanner model to shed light on spatial dynamics in the future. The outcomes made clear what the probable consequences of both autonomous developments and specific policies will be in future and which policies could be needed to address these changes. As such, the spatial scenarios and simulations contributed to a better-informed decision-making in spatial planning and sustainability issues.

Developing a New, Market-Based Land-Use Model

This book describes the extensive experience that PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and its partners have built up in more than a decade of using land-use models to support policy-making. The land-use models of PBL – Land Use Scanner and Environment Explorer – have in several large studies contributed substantially to the research findings and policy recommendations, making them a standard component of the analytical framework of outlooks where spatial dynamics are essential for sustainability and environmental quality in future. The performance of the models has been evaluated both by PBL and an audit committee of international experts; the findings of the committee are summarised in Chapter 2. The overall conclusion is that the models represent the state of the art for their current practice, but that to enlarge their potential contribution to policy questions and to address new policy challenges a substantial model redesign, or the development of a new model, is needed. Important challenges in doing so would be the inclusion of the behaviour of key actors in the model chain, the inclusion of essential feedback loops between different sectors and geographical scales, the structural inclusion of transport within the land-use model, and a better integration of water management and land use to be able to evaluate spatial adaptation strategies related to climate change. The insights from the different subject-specific research findings have been highlighted and processed to formulate several basic features to be included in the design of a new land-use modelling framework. In this final chapter, we describe the way forward for the development of such a land-use model. After an evaluation of achievements and drawbacks of the current model chain for the support of strategic policy questions, we discuss the ambitions and options for a new land-use model. Subsequently, the various activities carried out to arrive at the general specifications for the new model and the results achieved so far are highlighted.