Gerard de Jong

National and International Freight Transport Models: An Overview and Ideas for Future Development

This paper contains a review of the literature on freight transport models, focusing on the types of models that have been developed since the 1990s for forecasting, policy simulation and project evaluation at the national and international levels. Models for production, attraction, distribution, modal split and assignment are discussed. Furthermore, a number of ideas for future development, especially for the regional and urban components within national freight transport models, are included.

COMPARISON OF CAR OWNERSHIP MODELS

Car ownership models found in the academic literature (with a focus on the recent literature and on models developed for transport planning) are classified into a number of model types. The different model types are compared on a number of criteria: inclusion of demand and supply side of the car market, level of aggregation, dynamic or static model, long‐ or short‐run forecasts, theoretical background, inclusion of car use, data requirements, treatment of business cars, car‐type segmentation, inclusion of income, of fixed and/or variable car cost, of car quality aspects, of licence holding, of sociodemographic variables and of attitudinal variables, and treatment of scrappage.

Value of Freight Travel-Time Savings

The monetary value of travel time savings in freight transport can be used to include travel-time benefits in cost-benefit analysis and to compute generalized travel costs in traffic forecasting models. Several methods have been used to attach a monetary value to freight travel-time savings, including revealed and stated preference methods. In this chapter, an overview of these methods and of the main numerical outcomes is given, as well as an example of a recent application.

The Aggregate-Disaggregate-Aggregate (ADA) Freight Model System

Disaggregate models –defined here as models using observations at the level of the traveler, the traveling group, the business establishment or the shipmenthave several advantages over aggregate models (which use groupings of those units as observations, e.g., groupings by geographic zone). Disaggregate models can be based on a foundation in behavioral theory, can include more detailed policy-relevant variables and do not suffer from the aggregation biases of aggregate models. Nevertheless, there are perfectly valid reasons why some of the components of a model system are modeled in an aggregate fashion. In this paper, we propose an ‘aggregate-disaggregate-aggregate’ (ADA) model system for freight transport.

A pilot study into the perception of unreliability of travel times using in-depth interviews

In the Netherlands a major empirical study is underway to measure the value to society of travel time benefits and travel time reliability benefits in passenger and freight transport. The study is commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Transport to a consortium consisting of RAND Europe (now succeeded by Significance), the VU University in Amsterdam, and John Bates. The resulting values of time (VOTs) and values of reliability (VORs) from the study will be used in cost benefit analyses (CBAs), in accordance with government directives. The VOTs will be updates of existing values from previous studies, the VORs will be the first of their kind for the Netherlands. The VORs will be estimated using Stated Preference (SP) experiments. In the past years several researchers have designed formats to present unreliability of travel times to respondents in SP experiments. These formats use concepts from statistics like average travel time, travel time variance, probability of arriving late, histograms, etc. The big question for us was whether these fairly advanced concepts are understandable for laymen travellers without a degree in statistics or even higher education. To the best of our knowledge, this issue has never been empirically put to test. It is, however, crucial to gain insight in the quality of the empirical results for VORs collected from interviews. In the analyses eight formats were tested. Respondents were stratified according to their education level. There were three groups of questions. First, questions about how respondents conceptualise unreliability themselves. Do they think in terms of average, minimum, maximum travel time or probability? And how complicated do they find these concepts? Secondly, respondents were prompted with questions to test whether they gave the right answer for the different presentation formats. Thirdly, there were questions about the respondents assessments of the eight presentation formats regarding clarity, ease of handling, and visual attractiveness, and which ones were preferred. The interviews supplied a clear winner among the eight formats. This format is not only preferred by a majority of respondents, but also equally by people with low and high levels of education. It contradicts the conventional wisdom that a picture says more than a thousand words. This format will, therefore, be used in the forthcoming main study. For the covering abstract see ITRD E137145.

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.

Accelerating Car Scrappage: A Review of Research into the Environmental Impacts

This paper reviews the literature on policies that aim to accelerate car scrappage and on related models. We conclude that substantial model efforts have been made to capture the direct reaction of households with older cars to the scrappage schemes, but that indirect effects on the second-hand car market, effects on car use and emissions from car use and on lifecycle emissions have received far less attention. Emission effects are modest and occur only in the short term. The cost-effectiveness of scrapping schemes is often quite poor. The most favourable cost-effectiveness scores occur in large densely populated areas, and only (or mainly) if cars with old (or no) emissions control technologies are scrapped. A full overview of the pros and cons of scrapping schemes, including all the dominant effects and their determinants in an advanced way, is lacking. Nevertheless, we think the general conclusions with respect to the effects and cost-effectiveness as presented above are quite robust.

Impact of E-Economy on Traffic and Traffic-Related Indicators in Urban Areas

As part of the Prediction of E-Economy Impacts on Transport (POET) project for the European Commission, the impact of the e-economy (including an increasing uptake of teleworking and teleshopping and better use of intelligent transport systems) on transport in a number of selected urban areas in Europe was modeled. The modeling for the urban areas used existing transport models (passengers and freight) for Paris; Stockholm, Sweden; Naples, Italy; Hamburg, Germany; and the Randstad, the Netherlands. Second, it used several scenarios on the degree to which information and communication technologies would be adopted for the year 2010. The third element in the modeling at the urban level was the use of so-called front-end models, estimated on new stated preference data. The outcomes in vehicle kilometers were also used to calculate the impact of the e-economy on energy use, emissions, and traffic accidents. Also, for some areas, impact on congestion and accessibility was calculated. For some of the areas and scenarios, considerable reductions in passenger kilometerage were found as a result of e-economy developments, but freight transport increased.

The impact of fixed and variable costs on household car ownership

Abstract Car purchase taxes in The Netherlands are among the highest in the EU. The Dutch government plans to gradually replace car purchase and ownership taxes by a national road user charging system (kilometre charge) in the period 2012 to 2016. As a result, new and second hand car prices in the Netherlands will drop up to 30%. Relatively little research has been conducted on the impacts of such large price changes on car ownership. Reduced car prices are likely to lead to an increase in car ownership. But consumers could also refrain from buying extra cars when they consider the extra operating costs resulting from the kilometre charge. This paper presents one of the few empirical studies to examine the effects of both (large) fixed and variable car cost changes on both car ownership and use. An internet survey among Dutch households was designed and conducted including stated intentions and stated preference experiments. We investigated whether households react more to present one-off fixed costs than to recurrent variable costs, for various specifications of car costs. Model analysis was conducted to derive fixed and variable price elasticities for private car ownership and effects of the kilometre charge. The study shows in their car purchase decisions, households react more strongly to a change in euro per year in fixed car costs than to a euro per year in variable car costs. Abolishing the Dutch car purchase tax while at the same time introducing a kilometre charge will lead to 2% rise in car ownership on the short to medium run (1–5 years).

Freight Service Valuation and Elasticities

In many countries, plans for transport infrastructure projects and transport policy measures are evaluated ex ante using cost-benefit analysis. This requires a conversion of benefits and disbenefits that by their nature are not in money units into money. Important examples are the transport time benefits and transport time variability benefits. A secondary practical reason to undertake freight service valuation studies is that some components of freight transport models need a conversion factor from outside the model, because it is not possible, inefficient or inconsistent (with regards to other components) to estimate the conversion factor within the model component itself. In this chapter we will discuss the methods that can be used to derive such values and we provide an overview of outcomes. The main use of elasticities is in high-level models, to get a first impression of the likely impacts of some policy measure. In this chapter, we will review the outcomes of the elasticity literature, distinguishing transport cost and time elasticities.