Sustainable transport in the Eurodelta: future flows and policy options

The ‘Megaregion Eurodelta’, a spatial synergy formed by the Northwest European metropolitan regions in the Netherlands, North Rhine-Westphalia, Flanders, Brussels and Northwest France, is a global hub for goods and services, exhibiting well-developed cross-border inter-urban connections with nearly 50 million people reachable within 3 hours of travel. This megaregion has a great potential to set an example in the ambitious pursuit of aligning transportation with EU sustainability targets.

This paper summarises an ESPON analysis explaining changes in sustainability parameters (CO2, NOx, PM10 emissions and energy use) through changes in transport policies in the Eurodelta, compared to a baseline scenario. The analysis resorts to the European transport network model Trantools3 (Tools for Transport Forecasting and Scenario testing) in order to simulate changes in transportation demand in the Eurodelta for the years 2030 and 2050.

Transport demand simulations are adjusted for 6 societal challenges:

1) health and economic crises

2) climate change and energy transition

3) technological progress in transport

4) globalised transport

5) circular economy and

6) EU disintegration

Read more in our working paper

Documents

Sustainable transport in the Eurodelta.pdf

  • Acrobat Document | 1.18MB