European Transport / Trasporti Europei (2001) 19/VII

The article is a summary of a report presented during the seminar "Il mare risorsa prioritaria del Corridoio Adriatico" (The sea as the primary resource of the Adriatic Corridor), organised in November 2001 by the Pesaro and Urbino Chamber of Commerce. The transport of lorries by Ro-Ro ships across the Italian seas (also known as "Sea Highways") is a widely- discussed topic in Italy. Indeed, many stakeholders believe that the use of sea ways is a truly useful way of lifting the burden of traffic off the highways. The article emphasises the need to evaluate the real potential of Ro-Ros in cutting the highway traffic in the Italian regions facing the Adriatic, and separating Italian domestic transport from the international one. Further, the article includes other observations that emerged during the debate on the "Sea Highways": it advises against the drawing up the "sea highways " strategy on the basis of the comparison between transit times in road and sea transport, and stresses the need to concentrate the Ro-Ro infrastructures in few ports. The article concludes with considerations on the need to impose, in international traffic (towards Greece and Turkey), rigid roles for each Adriatic port, in order to avoid the Italian roads being used by foreign lorries. The latter, when crossing over from Central Europe and the Mediterranean countries, prefer to use - for economy's sake - the ports in Southern Italy instead of those placed in the North, thus increasing instead of cutting down road traffic.

The purpose of this study is to provide a first overview about problems associated with the behaviour of drivers under reduced visibility conditions, especially when due to the presence of fog, in order to improve road safety. During the first part of the work, an attempt was made to study the problem of the physical constitution of fog, how it arises and how it can be classified. Therefore a study was made, dedicated to the modifications which the human eye undergoes in conditions of scattered light and poor visibility. This way, an attempt was made to evaluate the influence of poor visibility and fog on the driver, and which guidelines to follow to make driving safer.

In this paper the elasticity of National travel demand for passenger transport with respect to level-of-service (e.g. transport time and cost) and socioeconomic attributes (e.g. number of cars per person, number of licenses per person, etc.) is investigated. The study has been carried out within the EXPEDITE project (EC-DGVII, 2002), whose main goal is producing multi-modal demand forecasts up to 2020 for passengers transport for Europe, by means of a Strategic Transportation model of the whole European Transport System. The modeling approach followed within the project is outlined in the paper; it is based on the already calibrated European model SCENES project (EC-DGVII, 2000), enhanced by means of existing National and regional demand models. Within the EXPEDITE modeling framework, the Italian National Models System (Cascetta et al., 1995) has been run in different scenarios (e.g. increases/decreases of travel time and costs, increases/decreases of cars per person, etc.), to obtain values of "are " elasticity for a number of identified socioeconomic and territorial market segments. The results obtained are here presented and discussed.

The term land-use covers a variety of topics, including activities such as residing, working and shopping; physical infrastructures such as homes and workplaces; and the outcomes of market processes, such as property of land values. Ali these topics can be affected by changes in transport, which will have a consequential effect on travel demand and, therefore, on transports supply system performances. To simulate these interactions, labelled in literature as integrated land- use/transport interactions, several modelling approaches have been proposed. One of the last ones applies behavioural discrete choice modelling to activity and residential location decisions, obtaining a theoretical consistency among land-use and transportation models. The objective of this paper is both on the methodological issues and practical implications of the behavioural approach. Two residential and activity location choice models consistent with Random Utility Theory are presented. The models outlined, developed and calibrated far the city of Naples (Italy) and the city of Rome (Italy), are specified and the calibration results are discussed. In order to validate the approach followed a comparative analysis based on empirical criteria, t-student statistic and model elasticity is finally presented.