Direct and cross cost elasticity estimations for freight transport in Europe using constructed dependent variables

Abstract

Elasticities can be used in the context of transport policy decisions to estimate the impact of changes in transport costs, or the impact of new infrastructure on traffic or modal split, for example. Their estimation is often made difficult by the lack of available data, especially when the study area represents a large international territory.

In this context, a modal choice model with three explanatory variables is presented. In a fairly standard way, transport costs and transit times are used. The originality of the model presented is that it also incorporates two accessibility measures and that the values for the three explanatory variables are computed using origin-destination matrices and digitized networks. Transport costs and transit times are calculated for each origin-destination relationship, type of commodity and transport mode, using a transport network model. The latest also provides the length of each relationship, which is used, along with the annual transported tons, to calculate two accessibility measures.

The article explains why accessibility finds its place in the utility function used in the modal choice model and shows how it improves the model's performance.

The model is further used to compute a set of direct and cross freight demand elasticities for road, inland waterways and rail transport with respect to a change in the total cost of transport on the European territory. The computed elasticities are compared with other values identified in the literature. The presented values can be considered as being credible and robust.