The paper describes the applications that have been made of the "National Model", which can forecast traffic on the strategic networks of The Netherlands (both road and rail) over a period of 10- 30 years. The specific applications which are described here were made in the context of the Second Traffic and Transportation Structure Plan(SW II), which is currently being prepared. An initial application of the model was to obtain a reasonable estimate of traffic growth on the maintenance of existing service levels. Traffic growth on the roads, arising largely but not exclusively from a large anticipated growth in car ownership, was forecast to be very substantial by 2010, the planning horizon of the study; public transport showed little growth. Alternative `scenarios' were investigated to show the effect of uncertainty in the economic forecasts. A series of simple runs of the model indicated the extent of elasticities of traffic volumes to general policy measures. These gave insight into the design of policy packages that could deal with traffic growth, the packages comprising: (a) network changes, and in particular improvements to public transport; (b) pricing changes, including parking controls, petrol taxes and/or general or localised "road pricing"; and (c) land-use planning options. Each of the policy options was assessed on a number of criteria, such as traffic flow standards, financial considerations, safety and pollution. The packages were subsequently adjusted the better to meet defined policy goals and re-assessed. At each stage, global and detailed extracts were made from the model outputs to support the assessments; this required that the model run quickly and produce output tailored to the needs of the assessments.
Abstract