Within the EXPEDITE Consortium, a large number of policy runs have been carried out with the SCENES European transport model and with four national models for freight transport: the Swedish model (SAMGODS), the Norwegian model (NEMO); the Belgian model (WFTM), and the Italian model (SISD). To the maximum possible extent, the same runs were done with each of the models. The outcomes were expressed in the form of elasticities. These were used to construct the EXPEDITE meta-model for freight transport. The amount of freight transport by mode, distance band and commodity class for 1995 and the 2020 reference is taken from the SCENES (for the current fifteen member states of the EU) and NEAC (for the accession countries) models/databases. The EXPEDITE meta-model can only give the impact in terms of tonnes and tonne-kilometres of changes in policy variables such as the transport time and cost by mode, on top of the levels provided by SCENES and NEAC. For this, the EXPEDITE meta-model for freight contains almost 3,000 elasticities, which are unweighted averages of elasticities from the four national models and the SCENES model. The modes considered are: road transport, conventional train, combined road-rail transport, inland waterways transport, and maritime transport. The innovations in EXPEDITE were in the merging of international and national models, and in the development of an ultra-fast approximation to computationally demanding network-based models. The merge included transferring results from countries that had developed models to countries that did not. The scenario-forecast results generated by EXPEDITE for this project were restricted to one single scenario, a scenario in which the population and the economy were assumed to grow more or less in lines with past trends in the 1990s. Costs of travel were assumed unchanged from 1995, and it was assumed that provision of new road capacity would be such as to maintain speeds at 1995 levels. Changing any of these assumptions would change our output travel demand consequences. For the period 1995-2020 (under the reference Scenario, without major policy changes), large increases in the use of road transport are predicted. The biggest increases percentage-wise are all in the east of Europe. The underlying forecasts can be interrogated in a multitude of ways, to look at the types of commodity and length of haul of the road freight consignments. In EXPEDITE, a number of policies and packages to reduce road freight transport have been evaluated in terms of effectiveness (modal shift to other modes), impact on internal and external costs and required investment, operation and maintenance costs. For freight transport policy, the best options seem to be to improve intermodality and interconnectivity. Tightening regulations on speed and on working practices for road freight are next most effective. Improving water-based freight is ineffective as a means to reduce road freight. For the covering abstract see ITRD E126595.
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