Martine Mostert

External Costs as Competitiveness Factors for Freight Transport — A State of the Art

ABSTRACT External costs have been a key issue in the last years of transport research. In Europe, this trend is in line with the political willingness to internalize externalities in transport pricing policies. This paper has two purposes. It first identifies the recent work achieved in the field of external costs of road and intermodal freight transport, where each paper is assessed in terms of its perspective (academic or project oriented), its objective (prescription, application, projection), the type of externality (air pollution, climate change, noise, accidents, congestion) and the type of cost (marginal, average, total) that is considered. The literature review reveals a gap in the development of generic mathematical functions for external costs of transport. The second objective of the paper is thus to highlight the usefulness of such functions by identifying the main parameters that influence freight transport competitiveness in terms of external costs, and by determining which of these parameters should be incorporated in further research works.

A road map for explorative scenario creation on Belgian rail freight transport development

The starting point of this article is the weak usage of rail freight in Belgium and Europe, both as a sustainable mode of land transportation in itself as well as a part of the intermodal chain. The results are obtained by transversal research on rail freight transport in Belgium, taking into account the European context. This interdisciplinary research develops a road map for the creation of three integrated scenarios: a best case, medium case and worst case scenario for rail freight development, based on a detailed SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunities, threats) analysis. It includes the most probable future developments for rail freight transport and hinterland connections. These developments are obtained from literature review and discussions with a heterogeneous panel of experts in the fields of (i) optimal corridor and hub development, (ii) macroeconomic impact, (iii) sustainability, (iv) effective market regulation and (v) governance and organization for a well-functioning intermodality. The Delphi approach is used in combination with a survey analysis. Frequency tables and the H-index allow defining a ranking and selection of SWOT elements. The obtained scenarios allow future research to quantify and measure the impact of future developments and decisions towards the Belgian rail freight market.

Design and Management of Freight Transport Networks: Intermodal Transport and Externalities

This is a summary of the author’s Ph.D. thesis supervised by Sabine Limbourg and defended on May 29, 2017 at the University of Liège, Belgium. The thesis is written in English and is available from the author upon request at martine.mostert@ulg.ac.be and from http://hdl.handle.net/2268/211640. This work develops new intermodal freight transport models which take into account the negative impacts of transport on its environment. A literature review on transport externalities and their valorization methods highlights the small number of studies related to the general modeling of transport externalities through dedicated mathematical formulas. However, the latter are important for identifying the key parameters that influence transport competitiveness in terms of externalities. This is demonstrated by analyzing two external cost functions for road and rail. The location of intermodal terminals, where the flow transfer between road and a more environmentally friendly mode occurs, stands out from the environmental perspective as one of the most important competitiveness factors of intermodal transport regarding road. An innovative mathematical model for the location of terminals and allocation of flows between road and intermodal rail and inland waterways (IWW) transport is developed. The model is based on a bi-objective formulation which evaluates the trade-offs between transport operational costs and CO2 emissions. Economies of scale of intermodal transport are integrated thanks to nonlinear functions. The model is applied to the Belgian network. Results indicate that terminal locations are relatively stable, whatever the optimized economic or environmental objective. The type of terminal located changes according to the followed strategy. Minimizing CO2 emissions leads to an increased use of intermodal transport. The impact of transport on air pollution is also evaluated. On the Belgian case, an economic optimization of transport operational costs is compared