Public policy instruments to promote freight modal shift in Europe: evidence from evaluations

ABSTRACT

A modal shift of freight from road to rail and waterborne transport can contribute to reduced negative externalities (mainly air pollution) from freight transport. The purpose of this paper is to identify modal shift public policy instruments in Europe and analyse their performance based on existing ex post evaluations. This analysis identifies 93 public policy instruments, in which 20 ex post evaluations were found. The evaluations mainly consider subsidies/grants at the national level or regulations and directives at the European Union (EU) level. The results suggest that evaluations of subsidies and grants at the national level most commonly describe a positive performance, while several evaluations at the EU level describe a poor or mixed performance. Well-defined targets and simpler application processes are mentioned in several ex post evaluations as suggestions for improving the performance of modal shift policy instruments in Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Modal shift
• freight transport
• public policy instruments
• evaluation
• Europe

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all project members of the MOdal Shift for an Environmental Lift (MOSEL) project for their great efforts in making this publication possible. This paper is based on a chapter of the dissertation of Johanna Takman: “Reducing greenhouse gas emissions – Examples from the freight transport sector: Essays on economic growth, public policy instruments, and renewable energy”. Published by Chalmers University of Technology, October 2021.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Short Sea Shipping and Inland Waterways.

2 For example, Svindland and Hjelle (2019) found that a relatively high-capacity utilisation is needed for maritime transport to be more CO₂ efficient than road transport.

3 Including accidents, air pollution, climate, noise, congestion, and habitat damage (CE Delft, 2020).

4 Public policy instruments refer to political tools employed to correct for market failures and to reach societal objectives, such as a modal shift to reduce the negative externalities from road freight transports.

5 Several such policies and targets are driven by the European Commission’s “Transport White Paper”, which specifies a modal shift of 30% for long-distance road freight transport (i.e., >300 km) by 2030 and one of more than 50% by 2050 (European Commission, 2021a; Pinchasik et al., 2020).

6 Combined transport refers to intermodal transports where the road leg of the transport is as short as possible (European Commission, 2016a).

7 Grey literature refers to unpublished research and publicly available open-source information, usually available outside of traditional publishing and distribution channels. It may for example include government reports, newsletters, working papers etc.

8 The database is available from the authors upon request.

9 A full list of the identified policy instruments is available in the supplementary material.

10 A full list of the evaluated policy instruments and further characteristics is available in the Supplementary Material.

11 Table 2 in the Supplementary Material provides detailed information on the methodology applied.

12 Further details regarding the policy instruments and their evaluations are available in the Supplementary Material (Table 3).

13 Some examples are the Marco Polo Programmes, Motorways of the Sea, NAIADES, TEN-T and the Eurovignette Directive

14 Such as the Eurovignette Directive, Combined Transport Directive, EU Regulation 561/2006 regarding rest periods on rolling/floating roads.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Naturvårdsverlet (Grant number: 802-0104-17).