Estimating impact of transport policies on motorways of the sea projects in the Atlantic corridor — a case study of searoad services

Abstract

<p>The main objective of the Motorways of the Sea (MoS) projects is to develop high quality maritime-based intermodal links to bypass congested land transport corridors so that they can provide an alternate competitive means of transport to unimodal road freight transport. The MoS projects are a political initiative of the European Commission (EC) but require the participation of private and public stakeholders. EC has proposed a number of policy measures to promote MoS projects. The need of the hour is to estimate the impact of the proposed policy actions on the performance of the MoS projects in order to develop effective set of policies to promote MoS services on the selected transport corridors.</p><p>Conventional modeling techniques in transport policy analysis have used macro-economic modeling techniques. Since freight transport service choice decisions are taken at company level we argue that micro simulation using an agent-based modeling framework will provide a better framework for transport policy analysis. We demonstrate that agent-based modeling and simulation is an effective tool to explicitly simulate the dynamics of transport service choice decision making at the operational level and transport policy decision making at strategic level in the same model. The validation and flexibility of the developed agent-based model is illustrated by presenting a case study in the Atlantic maritime region.</p><p>Simulation results from case study indicate that policy measures that improve efficiency of MoS services are not sufficient to improve market share of MoS services in the Atlantic corridor. These measures must be supported by uniform rules and stricter enforcement of International road freight transport regulations for favorable modal shift to MoS services.</p>