This presentation examines the changes and structure of Spain's highway transportation fleet over the last 20 years within the general framework of the situation in the European Union. According to official statistics, the knowledge we have about this fleet is clearly insufficient, and at times, it projects a false image of the real picture. Our objective is to redress this situation by creating new fleet models, whose validity will need to be backed by better-known variables, such as fuel consumption, traffic flow in specific networks, etc. Starting from this improved approximation to reality, we correlate the changes in a set of basic variables (fuel consumption, maintenance costs, environmental impact and both active and passive safety) with the age of the vehicles. Generally speaking, results indicate that the age of Spain's fleet leads to serious problems with regard to the under-optimization of highway transportation, so that any rejuvenation measures adopted will have a significant favourable impact on the economy and on certain external negative effects of transportation. These steps taken to rejuvenate Spain's fleet will have a more positive impact than raising taxes or generally curtailing the use of highway transportation vehicles. (A)
Abstract