Access to Railway Stations in the Netherlands

A rail journey is rarely an end in itself but almost always part of a journey ‘chain’ which include access to and egress from the railway station. The integration of the rail-journey components is essential to achieving a continuous travel, door-to-door, when using the rail and to make the rail an attractive alternative to car and this requires seamless interchange at the station between the chain elements. The paper focuses on two lines of investigation with regard to the above. First, the perception of railway stations and the access journey and their importance in the perception of the railway journey is analyzed. It is assumed that the perception of the rail journey is a function of the journey generalized costs, the station perception and the quality of the access and egress journeys. Based on the data available the potential of making rail a more attractive mode by improving (through different means) the station perception is examined. The second line of investigation aims to examine how availability of car affects the use of rail and the access to station mode choice. Based on the results the paper discusses the question of how rail use can be increased through facilitating the interchange between different transport modes at railway stations.

Biking and Walking: The Position of Non-Motorised Transport Modes in Transport Systems

Long run developments such as income growth and urban sprawl lead one to expect a continuous decline of thecontribution of non-motorised transport modes to the performance of transport systems. In terms of the total number of trips, non-motorised transport modes have retained high shares, however. The potential of non-motorised transport modes to contribute to the urban quality of life is increasingly being recognised. In this paper the possibilities of substitution between non-motorised and motorised transport are discussed. In addition, attention is paid to the issue of complementarity between motorised and non-motorised transport modes

Rounding of Arrival and Departure Times in Travel Surveys: An Interpretation in Terms of Scheduled Activities

In travel surveys most respondents apply rounding of departure andarrival times to multiples of 5, 15 and 30 minutes: in the annual Dutch travel survey about 85-95 percent of all reported times are 'round' ones. We estimate rounding models for departure and arrival times. The model allows one to compute the probability that a reported arrival time m (say m=9: 15 am) means that the actual arrival time equals n (say m=9:21 am). Departure times appear to be rounded much more frequently than arrival times. An interpretation for this result is offered by distinguishing between scheduled and non-scheduled activities, and by addressing the role of transitory activities. We argue that explicitly addressing rounding of arrival and departure times will have at least three positive effects. 1. It leads to a considerably better treatment of variances of reported travel times. 2. It enables one to avoid biases in the computation of average transport times based on travel surveys. 3. It overcomes the problem that the use of travel survey data for the minute-per-minute records of the development of the number of persons in traffic displays erratic patterns

Pricing Mobility

Externalities of transport do not only depend on the number of kilometres driven, but also on factors such as road type, time of day, car type and on driving behaviour such as speed and acceleration. The present pricing system of car use and ownership in the Netherlands is such that the degree of differentiation is small, except for the car type aspect. Thus there is a clear mismatch between the differentiation in external costs and in pricing. A considerable share (55%) of all car-related taxes in the Netherlands relates to car ownership. The rest (45%) is paid for car use. The structure of the tax system is only vaguely related to the differentiation in the external effects. To overcome this problem, variabilisation of the tax system has been a main objective during the past 20 years in the Netherlands. A discussion is given of various ways to achieve this variabilisation such as a spatial graduation of fuel taxes, congestion pricing, a kilometre charge, and paid parking. The treatment of transport costs as a deductible in the income tax leads to major distortions in the Netherlands: a low variable cost for commuting, a zero variable cost for the company car, and a negative cost in the case of private car use for business purposes. Thus, two major problems in the taxation of road transport are found: lack of differentiation so that the tariffs do not reflect the external costs, and adverse effects of the structure of the income tax in the fields of business traffic and commuting leading to low, zero or even negative costs of car use. Discussions on the reform of transport-related taxes generally focus on the first problem but the figures presented in this study indicate that the second problem also deserves high priority