Website: refit.bouw.tno.nl
REFIT aims at:
The REFIT consortium has identified three weakness in current practice of transport policy assessment. Firstly, the links between existing modelling tools and sustainability indicators are inadequate. Secondly, the existing modelling toolbox is incomplete, especially with respect to the impact of transport policies on regional economic growth, on social equity and on local environmental quality. Finally, there has been a tendency to address measures in isolation without an understanding of interdependencies between measures. Repairing these weaknesses will help to produce solid judgements about new transport policies.
Strong quantitative tool
Initially, a comprehensive assessment framework will be developed that links European transport policy objectives and indicators to the growing pool of tools and expertise accumulated within various European research projects. By combining an existing Europe-wide transport demand network model (like SCENES or Transtools) with the environmental TREMOVE model and the spatial economic CGEurope model, REFIT will offer a strong quantitative tool to evaluate transport policies. Additional evaluation modules will be developed to produce data for policy targets and indicators that, until now, have been hard to address quantitatively. These are most notably the impact on regional income and employment, local noise and air pollution, personal health and transport safety.
The REFIT project is led by TNO and will be carried out by a consortium of institutes from six European countries. The project will be completed during the Summer of 2008. During the project's lifetime intermediate findings will be presented at various international conferences. The first occasion where REFIT will appear is the TRANSFORUM Conference, on 9 and 10 November in Amsterdam.
The TRANSFORUM project is currently showing that much work has been done on methods and model development in the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth framework of the European Commission and the combinations of models may be capable to execute complex ex-ante evaluations of European transport policies. Three of the most advanced models on the European scale are the SCENES-model, a multimodal network based transport model that simulates passenger and freight transport at European scale, the TREMOVE model that models environmental impact of transport policies and the CGEurope-model, a computable general equilibrium model that models economic impacts of transport policies.
In addition the Commission has initiated a new network modelling study TRANS-TOOLS which aims at including amongst others the new member states (this project recently started and it is unsure whether results can be applied in full detail in REFIT). The combination of these three models, as we propose in REFIT, offers a particular strong quantitative tool that is able to cover many of the aspects needed to evaluate most of the transport policies and measures proposed in the White Paper. There have been previous projects where the three models were successfully lined together (SCENES and TREMOVE in the TREMOVE project for DG ENV, SCENES and CGEurope in the IASON research project during the Fifth Framework Programme) and in addition these three models are the modelling core of the mid-term evaluation of the White Paper on transport: time to decide which will take place during the year 2005.
However, during these previous projects and during the development of the project proposal of the mid-term evaluation of the white paper, several gaps in the expertise and tools to quantify important indicators occurred. That is why REFIT will not only match these three models with sustainability indicators but REFIT will also complete the existing modelling tool box by enhancing the current models with expertise built up during previous EU-projects like for example IASON (spatial economic impacts), EXTERN-E (external impacts) and IMAGINE (noise), TRANS-TOOLS (networks, TEN€s level).
A first outline of the themes on which REFIT will develop evaluation modules on top of, or within, the existing framework of SCENES/TREMOVE/CGEUROPE are:
The selection of these focus indicators is based on:
Developing tools implies also testing and validating them, TRANS-TOOLS will have a role in this process. In addition REFIT will use the developed tool box to make a Strategic Sustainability Assessment of various policy packages of priority interest, in terms of the relevant policy targets for Europe. Sensitivity analysis will be applied to validate the analytical soundness of the tool box.
In summary
REFIT aims at enabling the monitoring of the implementation of the European transport policies by developing a Strategic Sustainability Assessment toolbox. This toolbox will:
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TML - Transport & Mobility Leuven
CAU - Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
IER - Institute of Energy Economics and the Rational Use of Energy University of Stuttgart
ISIS - Istituto di Studi per l'Integrazione dei Sistemi
TRT - Trasporti e Territorio Srl
TNO - Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research Building and Construction Research