Although policy targets for modal shift have softened somewhat, the pressure to consider possibilities for modal shift is more urgent than ever, given the growing demand for responsive and lean logistics, accompanied by the expectation of cost increases in transport due to growing congestion, road charging, emission trading and oil price increases. The next generation of public policies and private strategies for modal shift has turned much more towards the logistics process, supported by new concepts like co-modality and hybrid networks. The potential for modal shift taking into account the logistics characteristics of goods is considered. Most approaches for assessment of the potential for modal shift have neglected logistics processes in their analysis and instead have relied on probabilistic methods to indicate that certain aspects in the choice process were not includedin the model. Others have used more complex micro-level optimization methods, but these have not yet been applied in practice using aggregate data.However this study assumes a very simple choice process that does consider logistics variables. A method to identify the potential for modal shift using statistics of transport flows and additional information on the logistic characteristics of the goods and the regions of origin and destination was developed. The analysis enables the identification of the share of the flows that fits to each individual mode of transport, given the following goods characteristics: transport distance, availability of terminals, packaging and value density, delivery time and shipment size. For all thesecharacteristics simple decision rules were developed to associate goods with possible modes of transport. The aggregate and the disaggregate databases, the filtering method developed using the mentioned flow characteristics and the potential for modal shift that results from the filtering process are described. The results also indicate to which degree the different modes have been able to capture the potential assigned to them. Two logical questions that follow (1) what can be done to capture the existing potential? and (2) what is the full potential, once the possibility of logistics re-organisation is taken into account? How concepts like co-modality andhybrid networks would affect the analysis and ways in which this future potential can be forecast are considered. For the covering abstract see ITRD E145999
Abstract