A long-distance travel demand model for Europe

In Europe, approximately 50% of all passenger kilometres come from trips beyond 100 km according to matrices developed in the TRANSTOOLS project. This accounts for an even larger share of CO2 emissions due to a higher modal share of air transport. Therefore long-distance trips are increasingly relevant from a political and environmental point of view. The paper presents the first tour-based long-distance travel demand model for passenger trips in and between 42 European countries. The model is part of a new European transport model developed for the European Commission, the TRANSTOOLS II model, and will serve as an important tool for transport policy analysis at a European level. The model is formulated as a nested logit model and estimated based on travel diary data with segmentation into business, private, and holiday trips. We analyse the estimation results and present elasticities for a number of different level-of-service variables. The results suggest that the perception of both travel time and cost varies with journey length in a non-linear way. For car drivers and car passengers, elasticities increase with the length of the journey, whereas the opposite is true for rail, bus, and air passengers - a fact that reflects a change in substitutability. Moreover, elasticities differ significantly by trip purpose with private trips having the highest and holiday trips the lowest elasticities.