Models for the Hazardous Goods Railway Transportation in Spain Considering the Effect of the Catchment Area of the Station

Abstract

The determination of the catchment area is an essential step when building a transportation demand model. The purpose of this work is the development of a generation and attraction model for the rail transport of hazardous goods in Spain. The observations for the model correspond to the volume of hazardous goods carried between the railway stations of ADIF, the Spanish rail network administrator. Another model has also been developed for those flows having origin or destination in the railway stations located in Andalusia, the southernmost region of Spain. In order to improve the fit of the model it was assumed that the area of influence of each station was directly related to the distance to the province capitals. Specifically for each station a new set of explanatory variables was obtained by weighting the original province level variables according to the distance to the station and to a weighting exponent. The transformation of the explanatory variables by means of a distance decay function allows assessing adequately the catchment area of the railway stations considered in the model.