The basic service quality level of transport infrastructure in peripheral areas

The provision of transport infrastructure outside the most populated regions in Finland has been under budgetary pressure for more than decade. Furthermore, many of these less populated areas suffer a decline of the population, which adds to the stress on these regional economies. The prolonged reduction in maintenance also starts to show on the local roads and secondary railroad connections, which in turn may necessitate the reduction of speed or axle load limits. Last year the Ministry of Transport and Communication commissioned a study on the issue in which the various constituent elements for specifying an infrastructure (minimum) service level were discussed. In addition the study indicated the problems and trade-offs of bringing these elements together in a compound evaluation of a (minimum) service level. The constituent elements are very diverse, comprising technical and regulatory aspects of road and rail transport, social aspects such as entitled and aspired range of action, and economic aspects such accessability of product and labour markets. The article summarises the discussion on these elements. In addition it illustrates to what extent compensatory effects have occurred as regards housing and transport when comparing households in the countryside with urban households. There are cost differences which are in accordance with the theory, but the income gap seems to be decisive. The illustration is based on micro-data from the years 1985-1998. The article concludes with pointing at the character of decision making, and the desirable integration of regional public investment portfolios from various policy areas.

Editorial

Environmental and social impact assessment are default elements of transport policypreparation and transport project appraisal in many OECD countries. In the recent pasthowever, it has been realised that such an approach does not suffice. Instead of representingpossible limiting factors, the aims and principles of sustainable development are to beregarded as the very point of departure for formulating transport policies, as is for exampleformulated in the European Commission White Paper on Transport (COM, 2001). This hasconsequences not only for policy formulation, but also for theresearch that is used to buildthe evidence about the actual and potential impacts of transport systems

The adequate integration of sustainability into transport policy

In this paper we discuss to what extent transport policy fails to integrate five types of external effects, and what kind of research needs follow from the objective to make transport sustainable. The discussion is a synthesis of the findings collected and synthesized in the framework of Focus Group 4 of the STELLA project. The assignment of Focus Group 4 was to draw up a set of recommendations for future transport policy-oriented research dealing with external effects, on the basis of a series of specialist workshops. Five different kinds of so-called external effects of transport were identified beforehand, being environment, safety and security, public health, land use and congestion. Safety and security as well as congestion are external effects in the sense that they are not ‘internalised’ in the price of the transport service, but they do affect predominantly others within the transport system. This means that with some delay the transport market still reacts to changes in the intensity of these effects, albeit biased or insufficient. The public goods character of both externalities however implies that public intervention is needed to attain better performance of these external effects, partly via internalisation of the external effects and partly via planning (i.e. by evaluating the trade-offs ex ante). The other external effects, however, are not only insufficiently internalised in the transport price, but they are also predominantly affecting parties outside the transport system. Consequently, changes in the intensity of these effects do not feed back directly into the transport market. In that case public intervention has even a more complicated task, since it takes more time and is more complicated to learn what are actually the right balances for the trade-offs between adequate access and, in turn, sustainability, spatial quality, and public health