Policy Analysis of Transport Networks

Marina Van Geenhuizen, Piet Rietveld, Aura Reggiani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317078999
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Interdisciplinary contributors from across Europe and the USA join together in this book to provide a timely overview of the latest theories and policies related to transport networks. They cover topical issues such as: environmental benefits of substitution of aviation by high speed trains; incident management; impacts of aviation deregulation; and time savings in freight transport. The book also breaks new ground on the development of new methods of cost benefit analysis and other approaches in policy analysis.

Chapter 1

New Trends in Policy Making for Transport and Regional Network Integration

Marina van Geenhuizen, Aura Reggiani and Piet Rietveld

1.1 Introduction

Over recent decades, the formulation of transport policy has become an increasingly complex task. This is because transport is not pursued for its own sake, but is derived from other activities such as living, working, production and recreation, which are themselves subject to increased complexity. The point is that new lifestyles and new methods of production are generating an increased demand for transport, including higher frequencies of service and longer travel distances. While new technologies are helping to make transport systems more powerful and efficient, at the same time, they also introduce additional complexities due to problems of unreliability and feedback effects.

Another reason for the growing complexity arises from the many, and often conflicting, goals involved in the determination of transport policy, such as increasing the capacity of the network to accommodate larger and quicker flows, reducing costs, and limiting environmental impacts (for example, Beuthe et al., 2004). The stakeholders concerned are increasingly finding themselves in a dynamic multi-actor situation, in which they attempt to influence decision making by exerting a stronger presence and by participating in rapidly changing networks. In particular, the social acceptability of transport policies is becoming a major issue in many countries. All this implies that now the policy-making process is ‘muddling through’ even more so than it did in the past.

A more recent development is the growing awareness that transport systems are vulnerable to criminality, terrorist attacks and natural disasters. These threats add new dimensions to the design criteria of transport networks: for example, the notion of robustness of transport systems in order to counter the terrorist’s aim to achieve maximum damage. This robustness is also crucial under the chaotic planning circumstances following a major disaster, natural or man-made, when the transport system has to be used in the best possible way for evacuation purposes or the supply of support activities. In this context, the evolution of the complexity of transport networks is clearly also dependent on technological information systems, which intensifies the ‘networked’ character of transport systems. Consequently: ‘An understanding of these complexities is imperative for the design of plans and policies that can be used to optimize the efficiency, performance and safety of transportation, telecommunications and other networked systems’ (Reggiani and Schintler, 2005, p. vi).

These issues imply that standard methods of policy analysis in the transport field should be further developed in order to address the current challenges. In particular, we mention the use of analytical methods for evaluating policy in the following main areas:

• Equity and social acceptability;

• Vulnerability due to terrorism and large accidents;

• Uncertainty and risk.

The socio-economic, political and technological trends mentioned above have had strong impacts on the functioning of transport systems and transport policy-making routines. In addition, there have also been important consequences for land use and regional development. Transport and communication serve to increase the accessibility of regions by improving network links: for example, bridging missing links or increasing the speed of flow over existing links and nodes. Telecommunication may compensate for large physical distances and may reduce time-distance to virtually nothing. In this context, the integration of regions is an important theme, including attention to the level of integration and to its impact on the organization of supply chains, the degree of specialization and the economic performance of the companies involved. In addition, in studies on regional and national convergence, progress has been made using new methodologies permitting new perspectives on convergence (for example, Cuadrado-Roura, 2001).

This book brings together a number of papers on these themes. We classify them under two main headings:

I.	Policy analysis in the transport field.
II.	Transport policies and regional network integration.

Before describing the individual contributions in Section 1.4, first a short review of the themes is provided in Sections 1.2 and 1.3.

1.2 Policy Analysis in the Transport Field

The solution of transport problems is steadily changing in nature because of changes in the underlying technological, economic and political decision-making contexts. In the limited space available here, it is not possible to give an exhaustive summary of all the developments, therefore we focus on three main forces that will receive further attention in this volume: equity issues; vulnerability of transport systems to terrorist attacks; and uncertainty.

1.2.1 Equity Problems and Transport Policies

Issues of equity and social justice play a role in transport policies in various ways. First, equity problems may be an unintended side effect of policies to address transport problems such as congestion and environmental nuisance. For example, opponents of charging for environmental externalities may claim that this measure has adverse equity effects since it will hurt the poor more than the rich. Second, equity may be the explicit aim of certain transport policies such as the construction of infrastructure in lagging regions, or subsidies to public transport to support the urban poor. In the latter case, equity is more than a side effect: it is the main motivation for a policy.

It is striking that, while efficiency plays a major role in social cost-benefit analysis, equity often receives most attention in the political domain. As a consequence, the outcomes of social cost-benefit analysis are often considered as less relevant in policy-making processes. But as noted, for example, by Viegas (2001), the notion of equity is not unambiguous. Equity concepts may cover horizontal equity (comparable individuals should be treated in a comparable way), level playing field (transport sectors should be treated in a similar way according to taxation, etc.), and the principle that individuals that are negatively affected by policies need to be compensated. Standard cost-benefit analysis is based on adding the net benefits of all winners and losers. But, by doing so, equity issues are ignored. A positive net benefit means that, in principle, the winners can compensate the losers. However, this is only a hypothetical compensation, and therefore a policy alternative with a clearly positive aggregate net benefit may have serious equity consequences. In order to improve the systematic search for, and development of, policy alternatives, there is a need for a tool where, in addition to efficiency concerns as reflected by cost-benefit analysis, equity concerns are also operationalized.

1.2.2 Transport System Performance Under the Threat of Major Accidents and Terrorist Attacks

The threat of major accidents is a consequence partly of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, tsunamis, and partly of man-made disasters. In both cases, transport is a relevant dimension of policies designed to reduce damage. When the accidents can be predicted with some degree of certainty, depending on the type of accident, then evacuation strategies may make sense. It is clear that this solution may easily reveal a lack of capacity to serve the sudden transport need at short notice. In that event, simulations with transport models may help to predict where the main bottlenecks will be, and whether expanding capacities at critical places can reduce these bottlenecks.

A related problem is the optimal use of transport systems for relief activities after the serious incident. The experience with the 2004 tsunami indicates that there is a need for creative combinations of existing transport modes that make use of waterways and roads, as far as they are still functioning, and air transport in cases where the usual transport modes are no longer operational. This raises questions such as whether and how transport infrastructure should be designed so that it is more robust in the case of natural disasters, and whether reserve capacities should be created to make incident management more effective. After the worst is over, it is necessary to select the best model of policy making for the reconstruction stage. As reconstruction often occurs under time pressure, there is a chance that links with overarching planning aims and principles are forgotten.

Of special importance is the vulnerability of transport systems in the case of criminal activities and terrorist attacks. The recent experiences in this field – the tragic train bombings in Madrid (2004) and London (2005) – make clear that transport is a soft target in both cases, because it is more difficult to protect than other targets. Given the different objectives, it is plausible that criminal activities like theft are mostly related to freight transport, whereas terrorism is more oriented towards passenger transport. The costs of these threats go far beyond the direct costs of criminal acts and terrorist attacks. For example, preventive measures, although necessary, can sometimes lead to delays in aviation schedules, implying an increase in the generalized costs. These changes may result in a decrease in overall travel demand, like in international trade (Nitsch and Schumacher, 2004) and in international tourism (Fleischer and Buccola, 2002).

Even this limited list of examples demonstrates that both natural and man-made accidents have far-reaching consequences for the planning and operation of transport systems that thus deserve due attention from policy makers and researchers during the coming years.

1.2.3 Transport System Planning and Uncertainty

Uncertainty in transport policy and planning is a theme that has attracted a great deal of interest since the 1990s. Failure to reach goals, adverse impacts of policy measures, large budget overruns in transport projects, and forecasts of future transport demand that turn out to be wrong, have all increased attention for uncertainty. Accordingly, it is now realized that transport policy – situated as it is in a dynamic field of actors’ interests, and at the same time attempting to influence systems that are unpredictable due to chaotic dynamics – suffers from uncertainty in many ways. Of course, policy tools already exist to increase insight into the costs and benefits of alternative policy interventions, or to learn about critical conditions and events in the future, as in scenario analysis, but what is new is the recognition of the need for awareness of intrinsic uncertainty and the acceptance of the implications of uncertainty for ways of policy making.

The reason why it is particularly transport policies that face such a great and comprehensive uncertainty stems from the derived character of transport which causes uncertainty in related policy areas, such as regional economics, housing and land-use planning, to spread into the transport field. Moreover, the transport system itself is complicated in nature as it encompasses all types of infrastructure, service provision, maintenance and control, use by passengers and freight, information systems to smooth processes, and an array of institutions that influence all the operations. What adds to the complexity is that, in forecasting exercises, different time-horizons need to be taken into account, ranging from a few minutes and hours to a few decades, not to mention different geographical scales.

If we take a comprehensive view of policy making and transport system behaviour, a wide range of sources of uncertainty can be identified. For example, there is complexity in the transport system itself, including social behaviour encompassing both daily traffic management and long-term planning and policy. In addition, there is complexity in policy making due to the ‘human factor’, including public opinion, emotional reactions to policy measures, value-oriented decision making, and so on. Another class of complexity in policy making is caused by the limited consensus on specific policies; a poor match with policies in adjacent fields, and so on (Friend and Hickling, 1997). There is also overestimation of the ability to design future transport images that are realistic, caused by simplistic conceptualizations of technological development and its impact on society (Geels and Smit, 2000). This limited list of examples of sources serves to demonstrate the widely different origins of uncertainty and its wide presence.

1.3 Transport Policies and Regional Network Integration

A useful tool to analyse the interrelationship between transport systems and regional development is the accessibility concept.

1.3.1 Accessibility

In the emerging European network, as a result of the recent inclusion of the new access countries, the spatial and functional positions of networks (and the related benefits from the use of these networks) are regarded as critical success factors for the development of regions, cities and firms (Martellato and Nijkamp, 1998). In this context, accessibility certainly plays a fundamental role, in investigating both slow dynamics, typical of the network supply side (infrastructure, facilities/locational development) and fast dynamics, characteristic of the user side (demand mobility/communication pattern) (Reggiani, 1998).

From the spatial/regional viewpoint, accessibility can be a useful instrument for exploring the (balanced) distribution of economic activities, the territorial dis equilibrium, and the development of the lagging zones: in other words, the growth performance of different regions.

The accessibility concept and its measures have a long tradition in spatial and transport science, starting from the 1960s. In particular, in the accessibility literature (1960—1990), three fundamental perspectives can be identified:

• The accessibility of a node is conceived in terms of its location.

• Accessibility is considered in terms of the opportunities that a person or group has, within a certain zone, to participate in one or more specific activities.

• Accessibility is identified by the benefits accruing to a group from living in a certain region and taking advantage of the available transport systems.

However, the different measures of these three indicators might produce conflicting results. In this context, transport policies would benefit from a synthesis of all the information contained in each of these indicators. In the recent literature, a great deal of attention is therefore given to the issue of a unique global accessibility measure. In this respect, multidimensional methods have been explored, such as Data Envelopment Analysis (Chapter 10) or Principal Component Analysis (Reggiani et al., 2005), with reference to the changes of accessibility in cities/regions generated by the construction of new European infrastructure projects (for example, the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T). This brings us to the issue of spatial convergence, accessibility and network integration.

1.3.2 Spatial Convergence, Accessibility, and Integration

It is interesting to note that the equity theme mentioned earlier in Section 1.2 also has implications for the discussion on accessibility. Transport policies, and investments in infrastructure in particular, will yield benefits that are equally distributed among regions. There is a general fear that large infrastructure investments will reinforce the position of existing core regions to the detriment of peripheral regions. This relates to the theme of regional integration and convergence. The literature on this subject indicates that solutions to this problem of unbalance are not as clear-cut as is often thought (see, for example, Rietveld and Bruinsma, 1998). The point is that the effects on the various regions vary per sector. Some sectors in one region will benefit, whereas other sectors in that same region will shrink. The effects on consumers and producers in each region may well be both positive and negative. In many cases, the net effects are rather small. Of particular importance in the case of infrastructure improvements is that usually the main beneficiaries are found at the nodes connected by a new link, and possibly some other nodes that benefit from the upgraded link, whereas the disadvantages are experienced by the rest of the economy in a rather diffused way. Thus, typically the spatial distribution of benefits of transport infrastructure investments is more focused than the distribution of the losses due to these investments.

Whereas the term ‘accessibility’ has the connotation of potential opportunities for interaction (for example, Hansen, 1959, in Martellato et al., 1998), the term ‘integration’ refers to actual patterns of interaction and flows of persons, goods and information. Increased accessibility does not automatically mean growing integration. The processes, in reality, may unfold in different ways. For example, economic actors may not be able to respond to the new opportunities, because – with the disappearance of one major accessibility barrier – other barriers to interaction may come to light, such as those caused by historical relations or by different cultures (van Geenhuizen and Ratti, 2001; and see Chapter 14). Of course, overcoming these constraints may simply be a matter of time.

Integration can also be considered ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 New Trends in Policy Making for Transport and Regional Network Integration
• Part I Policy Analysis in the Transport Field
• Part II Transport Policies and Regional Network Integration
• Index