Cost, transit time and speed elasticity calculations for the European continental freight transport

Abstract

The paper presents a set of freight demand elasticities for road, inland waterways and rail transport with respect to a change of total cost of transport, transit time and speed. They can be used in the context of transport policy decisions for estimating the impacts of changes in the cost of transport or the impacts of new infrastructure on traffic or on the modal split for instance. The calculations are based on origin-destination matrixes and networks made available by ETISPlus, a European transport policy information system. The transportation costs and transit times are computed, for each origin-destination relation, each group of commodities and each transportation mode of interest using a transportation network model. A Box-Cox approach transform the explanatory variables for an aggregated conditional logit analysis. If the estimation and validation steps of the models receive a special attention, the most important added value of this paper is probably the in-depth analysis and interpretation of the estimated parameters, and more specifically the optimal λ values used for the Box-Cox transformations.Own and cross elasticities are calculated for costs and transit time changes. All these values are computed at the trans-European level, but also for a large region around the Benelux countries, where there is more competition between the three modes. For this region, the impact of the geographical aggregation level of the O-D matrix (NUTS-2 vs NUTS-3) is also examined. Beside these classical analytical computations, the network model makes it also possible to compute arc elasticities. The obtained values are quasi-identical to the former, but this method allows the computation of ‘composite’ elasticities, which estimate the impact of a variation of a component present in more than one explanatory variables, such as travel speed, that influences both costs and transit times.