Study on EU urban areas accessibility

Study on Urban Mobility – Assessing and improving the accessibility of urban areas

This study in urban accessibility has been designed in order to advance the understanding of urban accessibility in order to improve the functioning of urban areas and make the transport system in Europe’s urban areas more efficient.

The study, carried out by Ricardo and TRT, comprises various tasks. TRT has played a major role in estimating European urban road congestion costs and comparing relative efficiency of urban passenger transport modes.

The welfare economic approach is used to define a measure of congestion cost in terms of deadweight loss in cities. The estimation of congestion costs per year (per capita and at urban level) is based on available congestion indexes for a sample of cities and other relevant information (population, value of time, share of car mode split, car occupancy factor). Delay congestion costs were also estimated.

The relative performance of different urban transport modes was assessed in relation to capacity; energy use; CO2 emissions and user cost. The above metrics were assessed for private modes (car and motorcycle) and public transport modes (bus and rail). Also, metrics was assessed for metropolitan areas and medium cities, and for peak (or congested) traffic and off-peak (or uncongested) traffic.